China Is Blamed for Hacking GitHub
https://sp-security.blogspot.com/2015/04/china-is-blamed-for-hacking-github.html
Online
privacy activists claimed they had proof that the Chinese authorities
were behind a massive cyber attack on their websites. It’s been a few
days now that a popular coding service has been experiencing a massive
DDoS attack, which particularly targeted 2 GitHub projects, both aimed
at fighting censorship in China: GreatFire and a Chinese version of the
New York Times.
GreatFire.org confirmed that its website and partner sites suffered a DDoS attack of a magnitude they had never been subjected before. The organization concluded that the attack in question was unusual in nature, and that the Chinese authorities were apparently steering millions of unsuspecting Internet users worldwide to launch it.
In result of consultations with independent researchers and the online community, GreatFire reportedly found out that the cyber attack was launched by hijacking the accounts of millions of Internet users all over the world. The list of victims included customers of Baidu – a local search engine and a Wikipedia-like service. Baidu is known as one of the largest tech giants in the country, and its Analytics code, which tracks and reports website traffic and is used by thousands of websites, was replaced by malicious code. This is how the users were hijacked.
GreatFire has published a research report describing the use of Baidu to steer millions of machines to start DDoS attacks, which backed up its accusations. In response, Baidu claimed that its software wasn’t involved in the attack and its systems had not been infiltrated. The company officially announced that its security engineers have ruled out the possibility of security problems or hacker attacks on its own products.
By:
GreatFire.org confirmed that its website and partner sites suffered a DDoS attack of a magnitude they had never been subjected before. The organization concluded that the attack in question was unusual in nature, and that the Chinese authorities were apparently steering millions of unsuspecting Internet users worldwide to launch it.
In result of consultations with independent researchers and the online community, GreatFire reportedly found out that the cyber attack was launched by hijacking the accounts of millions of Internet users all over the world. The list of victims included customers of Baidu – a local search engine and a Wikipedia-like service. Baidu is known as one of the largest tech giants in the country, and its Analytics code, which tracks and reports website traffic and is used by thousands of websites, was replaced by malicious code. This is how the users were hijacked.
GreatFire has published a research report describing the use of Baidu to steer millions of machines to start DDoS attacks, which backed up its accusations. In response, Baidu claimed that its software wasn’t involved in the attack and its systems had not been infiltrated. The company officially announced that its security engineers have ruled out the possibility of security problems or hacker attacks on its own products.
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