Here’s an interesting post by Google on their problems in China, alluding to the possibility that they might close down Google.cn

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Personally I’m not surprised. I’ve been firewalling all the servers I administer from all netblocks in China for a while now. If you’re not doing business in China, my advice is to do the same. Along with blocking netblocks in Eastern Europe, you’ll see a huge decrease in the number of malicious scripts and automated exploit attempts against your server, which has the nice side effect of lowering you bandwith and slimming down your log files. Here’s a convenient list of Chinese netblocks in CIDR format which you can add to your iptables.

http://www.okean.com/chinacidr.txt

It feels to me like were are on the cusp of some serious global cyberwars. If we want to maintain an open and safe Internet, it’s going to fall on us, as responsible developers and IT people, to talk openly about what we are seeing and dealing with.

So hats off to Google for being frank and open about their security compromises.