http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/16545.html
Wired News
China: The Great Firewall
by Niall McKay
3:00 a.m. 1.Dec.98.PST
American crackers have penetrated and
disabled half a dozen firewalls designed to
keep China's Internet users from receiving
censored information from the outside
world.
The crackers also defaced the Tianjin
City Network of Information of Science &
Technology site, which explains what the
people of China are entitled to access
legally over the Internet.
The weekend attacks added to the
growing number of acts of hacktivism, in
which political activists have used
information warfare to protest China's
stranglehold on free speech.
"This is a protest against the treatment
of Lin Hai, a man arrested for simply
sending email to the US who now faces
life in prison," said Bronc Buster, a
cracker and computer science
post-graduate student in California.
In October, Bronc Buster defaced a
Chinese government-sponsored Web site
that provides an official defense of
China's human-rights record.
In a separate move, the famous hacker
group Cult of the Dead Cow said it was
developing an email plug-in that would
enable Chinese Internet users to receive
banned Web pages by email.
"The email plug-in will go out and log on
to a proxy server and then email back the
page to the Internet users," said Oxblood
Ruffian, a former United Nations
consultant and member of the Cult of the
Dead Cow. "It's one thing to censor Web
sites, but it’s much more difficult to
censor email."
The group is no newcomer to hacktivism
in China. The Cult of the Dead Cow has
been working with the Hong Kong
Blondes, a group of dissidents that have
been infiltrating Chinese police and
security networks in an effort to warn
political targets of imminent arrests.
"This is the second attack on a Chinese
Web site from the United States in recent
months," said Yu Shuning, a spokesman
for the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
And the Chinese government is not taking
their actions lightly. "If these criminals
have broken US law, then we shall pursue
them and punish them."
The two crackers Bronc Buster and
Zyklon are members of the Legions of the
Underground <http://www.legions.org> but were
working independently on this occasion.
"We just couldn't believe how easy it
was," said Bronc Buster. "The authorities
are running outdated Sun Sparc and SGI
Irix workstations and many of the servers
are labeled as firewall servers, so they
were pretty easy to find."
All in all, the crackers found 20 firewalls
but only tampered with five of them.
Once inside the firewall server the
crackers simply instructed the software
to continue to operate but ignore the list
of banned Web sites.
"It's not a terribly difficult thing to do,"
said Space Rogue, a member The L0pht
Heavy Industries the Boston-based
Network Security Specialists. "Firewalls
are rarely configured properly so there is
often a way in."
The crackers also obtained a full list of
the sites blocked by China's firewalls,
including news organizations like BBC,
ABC, MSNBC, ZDNET, News.com, and
Wired News. All the search engines, and
even the family-oriented sites
Parents.COM, Family.com, and
Seniors.Com, are inaccessible to Chinese
Internet users.
The crackers used bogus Unix shell
accounts in Chicago, New York, Germany,
and Hong Kong to cover their tracks.
"The server I used in Hong Kong was
down this morning so I believe they
traced me at least that far," said Bronc
Buster.
Crackers and political hacktivists may find
China a more difficult target in the future,
however. According to China Daily, an
English language newspaper in Beijing, the
Ministry of Public Security has approved
the deployment of anti-hacker software
from Beixinyuan Automation Technology.
Copyright © 1994-98 Wired Digital Inc. All rights
reserved.
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