Web Security News

China's Green Dam web filter has security flaws

Monday, June 15, 2009

Green Dam, a Chinese web filtering software that can censor pornography and political content, has security holes that could be exploited by hackers to take control of PCs, a Chinese ministry has admitted.

Zhang Chenmin, general manager of the company that produced the software, told China Daily yesterday that the company was ordered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to patch the security holes as soon as possible.

Web security researchers from the University of Michigan identified two security flaws last week - one in how the software processes websites it monitors; and a bug in the way the software installs updates of blacklisted sites.

"Both allow remote parties to execute arbitrary code and take control of the computer," the researchers said in a report published on the university's website.

One of the researchers, J. Alex Halderman, told China Daily - the country's largest English-language publication - that installing the filter in its current form "will be a disaster for computer security in China."

A U.S. web filtering company, Solid Oak Software, has accused the Chinese maker of Green Dam of stealing code form its Cybersitter software.

Zhang, the head of the Chinese company, said the code was not stolen and he would sue the U.S. researchers for publishing "negative comments and attacks," China Daily reported.
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