More Questions than Answers About China Internet Outage – (January 22, 2014): Chinese Internet users are now able to access numerous websites including Baidu and Sina Weibo after the country once again experienced massive outages Tuesday.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which “operates and administers country code top-level domain of .cn and Chinese domain name system,” the cause was due to malfunctions with the servers that manage the .cn name system.
The latest outage was the second major disruption in five months. Last August, a denial-of-service attack caused large portions of the Chinese Internet to go dark in what in what Beijing called the “largest ever” hack attack on Chinese sites.
“China Internet Network Information Center no doubt learned some valuable lessons as a result of the August 2013 outage, where they found that it was internal Chinese hacking competition which disrupted the .cn domain,” said Christopher Burgess, CEO of Prevendra, Inc., an Internet security firm.
“In this instance, speculation of a ‘foreign hand’ will be high, as the outage was caused by Domain Name Service changes which rerouted traffic to a company, Dynamic Internet Technology, well-known for their anti-censorship web services tailored to evade the ‘The Great Firewall of China’,” he said.
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