Google vs China

As many have heard recently, Google’s presence in China may soon come to an end after the evidence turned up by their forensic analysis of state sponsored hacks against the corporation. The intent of the attacks is believed to be for industrial espionage and to rout human rights activists hailing against Chinese policies. The zero-day attack vector relied on an invlaid pointer reference exploitation within IE6 permitting the attacker to execute code remotely by carefully crafting the buffers and pointers. Code for the attack was released publicly only days ago forcing Microsoft to release an out-of-cycle patch anticipating that morphing versions of the code will not require an IE6 entry vector.

From the official Google blog, the corporation re-emphasizes their position towards China following the breach, “We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results …. These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

This article was edited after publication by the author on 20 Jan 2010. View changes.