‘Green Dam’ Makers Asked to Patch the Software’s Vulnerability

The Chinese software maker 'Jinhui', which created the Internet filtering software mandated by the Peoples Republic, has acknowledged the software called 'Green Dam Youth Escort' contains a severe security flaw.

The company says that there is a backdoor in the software that hackers could exploit to plant Trojan programs on users' computers. This could lead to the dissemination of virus infections or even compromise of systems remotely.

Moreover, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has said that the Green Dam developers should tentatively issue a patch for the software's vulnerabilities that could be remotely exploited as indicated in the published analysis during the 1st week of June 2009 about probable flaws in the software.

However, the Green Dam makers have asserted the vulnerability condition of the software is not different from any other software. Experts are indulged in coding of the Internet filter without giving importance to an inherent security, they said. That sounds quite interesting considering the fact that millions were earned when the software makers implemented the coding process.

In spite of Green Dam coming in the news and drawing the required reverse-engineering attention that revealed the software's vulnerabilities, the flawed edition of the censorware was sold to the Chinese end-users during early 2008.

Green Dam's website states that in April 2009, as many as 3.5 Million users downloaded the software, and more are anticipated to do the same after July 1, 2009 when it is packaged with all new saleable computers.

Not even a month passed after the launch of an advertising campaign that indicated the download link on 160 of the most frequented websites in China, there was a peak of 7,172,500 downloads with most of the Chinese provinces, universities and schools having already downloaded the software on their networks.

But now the company is recommending that people cease downloading the filtering program till it issues a patch.

Previously, the software drew the attention of different countries which claimed the software acts as the government's spyware. The University of Michigan said Green Dam includes several blacklists from the web-filtering program CyberSitter of Solid Oak in California.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 6/29/2009