A New Study Reveals That China’s Great Firewall Blocks Over 311,000 Domains

The Great Firewall is an alliance of different authoritative activities as well as technologies that are administered by the People’s Republic of China to control and improve the internet regionally.

However, the main goal of the Great Firewall in internet censorship in China is generally to block access to decided foreign websites and to reduce cross-border internet traffic. 

According to the report, GFWatch obtains domains from inside as well as from outside China’s internet space. Once it’s done with the domain soon it measures that how the Great Firewall (GFW) would interfere with the attachment at the DNS level so that it can stop Chinese users from obtaining a domain.

With the help GFWatch, the experts came to know that 534 million distinct domains have been tested for accessing about 411 million domains daily, and this was being done for recording and verifying that the blocks were determined.

The experts have started a research project that continued for 9 months, in 2020, and after completing the research, the security experts discovered that China’s Great Firewall has blocked nearly 311,000 domains, along with that 270,000 blocks operating as planned. While on the other side 41,000 domains get blocked by chance.

1800 popular domains blocked

According to the security experts, the domains that got blocked by GFW are mostly unpopular. However, the experts tested and checked the domains thoroughly, and they came to know that out of 311,000 domains only 1800 were the popular domains.

After the investigation, the experts noted that 1800 domains are from the top 100,000 most popular sites on the internet. However, the security analysts used the list of 311,000 blocked domains to conclude that what type of content Chinese governments normally block.

Blocking Rules

After knowing about this GFW, the experts have detected some blocking rule, and here we have mentioned them below:-

• Rule 0 censored_domain

• Rule 1 censored_domain{.rnd_str}

• Rule 2 censored_domain{rnd_str}

• Rule 3 {rnd_str.}censored_domain

• Rule 4 {rnd_str}censored_domain

• Rule 5 {rnd_str.}censored_domain{.rnd_str}

• Rule 6 {rnd_str.}censored_domain{rnd_str}

• Rule 7 {rnd_str}censored_domain{.rnd_str}

• Rule 8 {rnd_str}censored_domain{rnd_str}

The most important thing about GFW is that it has strongly affected the development of China’s domestic internet economy by sustaining the domestic companies as well as by decreasing the effectiveness of commodities from foreign internet firms.

The blocked domains mainly belong to the business-related content, apart from this the list also contains domains like the hosting tools, gambling sites, personal blogs, entertainment sites, news, and media sites, as well as domains hosting malicious/malware content.

You can follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook for daily Cybersecurity and hacking news updates.