YouTube, Facebook and Twitter "redirected to China"

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 26 Mar 2010 at 09:10

Visitors to some of the world's most popular websites - including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter - were reportedly redirected to servers in China this week.

One of the internet's main DNS root servers was reportedly rerouting traffic via China, giving visitors to those sites first-hand experience of what life is like behind the country's firewall. Sites such as Facebook and YouTube are banned in China, which has infamously strict web censorship rules.

The "hijacked" visitors were either sent to Chinese equivalents of the sites, or shown error messages claiming the sites were unavailable, according to a report on CNet.com.

The DNS hiccup comes in the same week that Google pulled its Chinese search engine.

The rerouting was apparently discovered by someone associated with Chile's DNS registry.

"A local ISP has told us that there's some strange behaviour with at least one node in i.root-servers.net (traceroute shows mostly China)," he wrote in an email.

"It seems that when you ask A records for Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, you get an IP and not the referral for .com. It doesn't happen every time, but we have confirmed this on four different connectivity places (three in Chile, one in California)."

Dan Kaminsky, the security researcher who helped patch a major flaw in the DNS system in 2008, said the rerouting appeared to be part of a deliberate attack. "What seems to be going on right now is a diplomatic war between the US and China, and in such a war there seems be a battle between an America company, Google, and whatever organisation is running the DNS in China," he told CNet.

The DNS hack isn't the only glitch to affect Google sites this week. On Wednesday, the Google site containing profiles of the company's executives was bizarrely translated into Chinese and other languages. Then yesterday, the YouTube homepage was knocked offline for two hours.