The destination US website belongs to Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a firm that specifically helps Chinese nationals get round China's national firewall (more commonly referred to as the Great Firewall of China). Bill Xia, the founder of DIT, is a member of Falun Gong. Early suspicions were that Falun Gong had somehow manipulated Chinese DNS servers (in a manner recently used by the Syrian Electronic Army) to redirect users to a different site.
DIT, however, has denied any involvement. "The outage, which began around 3:15 p.m. local time, redirected roughly 1 million requests per second to the DIT site," reports Reuters. "It's even clearer this is not an attack of all the Domain Name Servers in the world, but the same as the DNS hijacking technologies used by the Chinese government to block websites they don't want," said DIT's Xia.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a daily news briefing, "I don't know who did this or where it came from, but what I want to point out is this reminds us once again that maintaining internet security needs strengthened international cooperation. This again shows that China is a victim of hacking."
But suspicion is now falling on an engineering error within the Great Firewall itself, rather than hacking. Banned websites, of which DIT is one, are blocked by the Great Firewall at the DNS level. "Our investigation shows very clearly that DNS exclusion happened at servers inside of China," said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Information in the U.S. and an expert on China's Internet controls.
"It all points to the Great Firewall, because that's where it can simultaneously influence DNS resolutions of all the different networks (in China). But how that happened or why that happened we're not sure. It's definitely not the Great Firewall's normal behavior."
It remains possible that the redirect was instigated by a third party (such as Falun Gong), but it is beginning to appear just as likely to be a simple database entry error by overworked IT staff struggling to maintain the world's largest censorship engine.