DDoS attacks that crippled GitHub linked to Great Firewall of China

Rob Graham, CEO of Errata Security, has traced the origin of malicious code that pummeled GitHub pages to China Unicom, the same telecommunications company that has been caught before aiding the massive censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall of China. The white-hat hacker tracked down the source using a modified version of the traceroute network diagnostics tool. The customized traceroute used HTTP packets to trace their path along the Internet, rather than UDP or ICMP packets used in normal traceroutes. That allowed Graham to figure out the location of the node that was sending the malicious code.

The evidence implicating China's government in the GitHub DDoS attacks came the same week that Google and Mozilla said their browsers will no longer trust digital certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Center. CNNIC, in turn is administered by the Chinese government's Ministry of Information Industry. The evidence also comes as President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing economic sanctions on overseas hackers who perpetrate attacks on critical US infrastructure.