For those of you who are not aware of what the Green Dam I am speaking is all about – it’s a new piece of software that was thrust upon it’s Citizens a few weeks back. It is officially called as the “Green Dam for Escorting Children" filtering software which the authorities claim to filter pron and other malicious websites from easy access to children and adults too!! The last of the official statements that was announced by the Chinese IT officials was way back on June 30th, eversince they have kept numb – you may be wondering why?
Well, the new software seems to open a Pandora box of issues including many serious security issues – than protect the users from such stuff for what it was designed in the first place. Last month there was a damning report by Prof. J. Alex Halderman and his team that seems to have nailed the Green Dam to the Great Wall.
Prof. J. Alex and his team claims to have found several serious security flaws in the software which are likely attributed to “Programming Errors”. Also, his team claims that once the Green Dam software is installed it makes the user much more vulnerable to website scripts that can easily take control of the user’s system. Also, these scripts that can target the Green Dam’s vulnerability can easily steal sensitive information off a PC, also can steal passwords, send Spam or simply turn the computer into a botnet. Also, since Green Dam is designed to process blacklist updates – it can easily allow hackers or even the software makers to install malicious code on a user’s PC during the update process.
So, all these seemed to have nailed the Chinese very ambitious Green Dam project – also the program is available only for the PC version, so users of Mac, Linux and other OS’s are spared. Coupled with all this – it is one big flop!!
No comments:
Post a Comment