China clamps down to keep citizens isolated from the world

No wonder China supports North Korea, the world’s most hermetically sealed nation. From ycombinator:

GitHub hit by DDoS attack

This is an article [0] summarizes what happened. It is however in Chinese. So let me put a simple summary here:

Baidu has Baidu Analytics, a service similar to Google Analytics. In short, a website includes a javascript file from Baidu and Baidu will report some basic analytics to the site manager like how many visitors per day, how much time they spent on average per page etc.

Someone in the middle between a client outside China and Baidu, allegedly it should be the Great Fire Wall, changed the javascript file from Baidu and added some code so that any client executing the javascript file will periodically access https://github.com/greatfire/ and https://github.com/cn-nytimes/. This means any user who is accessing a site using Baidu Analytics will be an attacker to github.

Here is a simple solution: Block any javascript from Baidu if you do not use it. For chrome users, add the pattern [*.]baidu.com. See here[1].

Edit 1: Added a solution.

Edit 2: Format.

Edit 3: Oh, it’s not only Baidu Analytics. Baidu Ads’ javascript is also being hijacked and changed [2]. Imagine that all sites containing Google Ads use their visitors as attackers to attack github. Now it is literally what is happening to Baidu and its customers (and their customers’ visitors.) The javascript is only changed for visitors outside China. This is why people believe that is done by Chinese government — the only entity who has total access to all out-going routers in China. Since many Chinese users use VPN or other types of proxy to access Internet, they are all considered as visitors outside China. . .

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