, Columnist
Has Malware Jumped Over China's Great Firewall?
Government restrictions are creating an ecosystem in which malware thrives.
Chinese hackers recently conducted the first successful major attack on Apple's App Store.
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For years now, China's elaborate efforts to censor and control the Internet -- collectively known as the Great Firewall -- have restricted what the world's biggest population of Netizens can see and how fast they can download. Until now, that hasn't been much of a problem for anyone besides locals and companies such as Facebook and Google hoping to sell to them.
In recent weeks, however, Chinese-origin attacks on Apple's iOS and App Store have raised a discomfiting prospect: The closed-off Internet ecosystem China has created may be breeding malware that could affect the rest of us.