In one of
the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, much of the Internet traffic
in China was redirected to a small, 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne, Wyo.,
on Tuesday.
A large
portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites
ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China,
according to Compuware, a Detroit-based technology company.
The China
Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with
Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name
system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360
Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s
domain name system servers.
Those
servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great
Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including
Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea
Incorporated, a
mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo.
A simple
Google search reveals that the address on
Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne is not a corporate headquarters, but a
1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn.
That
address — which is home to some 2,000 companies on paper — was the
subject of a lengthy 2011 Reuters investigation that found that among
the entities registered to the address were a shell company controlled by a
jailed former Ukraine prime minister; the owner of a company charged with
helping online poker operators evade an Internet gambling ban; and one entity
that was banned from government contracts after selling counterfeit truck parts
to the Pentagon.
Wyoming Corporate Services, the
registered agent for Sophidea Incorporated, according to Internet records, did
not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon.
It was
not immediately clear what caused the traffic shift Tuesday. One Chinese
newspaper suspected a cyberattack.
But by late Tuesday, some technologists had come to an alternate theory: a
backfiring of China’s own Internet censoring system.
Sophidea
appears to be a service that redirects traffic from one address to another to
mask a person’s whereabouts — or to evade a firewall.
Some
technologists surmised Tuesday that the disruption may have been caused by
Chinese Internet censors who attempted to block traffic to Sophidea’s websites
but mistakenly redirected traffic to the service instead.
That
theory was buttressed by the fact that a separate wave of Chinese Internet
traffic Tuesday was simultaneously redirected to Internet addresses owned by
Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that helps people evade China’s Great
Firewall, and is typically blocked in China.
Bill Xia,
who created Dynamic Internet Technology in 2001, told
The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that his company had nothing to do
with the traffic shift and also suspected that the problem was the doing of
China’s own Internet censors.
The
disruption mirrored a similar incident in 2002 when Chinese Internet users
attempting to access Sina.com were redirected to a banned website belonging to
followers of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China.
Nicole
Perlroth reported from San Francisco. David Barboza contributed reporting from
Shanghai.
