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by Kronopath 3924 days ago
The "Great Cannon" attack that they talk about in the blog post wasn't caused by replacing JS in GitHub pages. It replaced a Baidu Analytics script, used across the Chinese internet on thousands of websites, with a malicious one intended to DDOS GitHub from people's home browsers when these websites were accessed outside of China.

The way that this fixes the issue is by ensuring that the file being loaded on those thousands of websites is the correct one, and not the malicious attack script that was injected by the Chinese government or other such actors, otherwise it's not run at all.

Could the Chinese government rewrite the HTML of all these thousands of websites to also change the hash? Theoretically yes, but practically it makes it much more difficult.