China blocks thousands of non-sensitive sites in brash move to censor a few bad eggs

Update: The Great Firewall has targeted another CDN, this time blocking the website of major bank HSBC. See more below.

Chinese authorities have blocked web access to thousands of websites using the EdgeCast content delivery network (CDN), according to GreatFire.org. The aim, says the anti-censorship activist website, is to censor GreatFire’s mirror sites, which are copies of blocked sites including Google Search and news site Boxun.

GreatFire assumed these sites would never be blocked in China because thousands of websites both inside and outside China rely on EdgeCast to push content to users. Essentially, if you block one site on EdgeCast, you block them all.

Authorities seem to have deemed these sites enough of a threat to justify the “collateral damage” done to non-sensitive sites. Major websites that use Edgecast include The Atlantic, Drupal, Firefox’s add-ons site, Gravatar, Speedtest.net, and Deviantart.com.

Greatfire says the attack comes in the form of DNS poisoning, which Wikipedia defines as:

[…] a computer hacking attack, whereby data is introduced into a Domain Name System (DNS) resolver’s cache, causing the name server to return an incorrect IP address, diverting traffic to the attacker’s computer (or any other computer).

Yesterday, EdgeCast posted a notice about the attack on its blog.

This week we’ve seen the filtering escalate with an increasing number of popular web properties impacted and even one of our many domains being partially blocked… with no rhyme or reason as to why.
For those of our customers who are frustrated by this, we share your frustration, as does the whole content delivery and hosting industry.

We’ll update this post as the story evolves.

Update November 19 @1030: GreatFire now reports websites using another CDN, Akamai, have also been targeted. As a result, websites using an encrypted Akamai subdomain have been blocked. That includes HSBC, the world’s largest bank. HSBC posted a notice on its website saying customers were experiencing problems logging in, but that notice was later removed. GreatFire is also an Akamai client, hosting some of its mirror websites there.

GreatFire spokesperson Charlie Smith (a pseudonym) told Tech in Asia that Chinese authorities’ efforts to block the mirror sites are not working: