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Starting in January 2015, the Great Firewall was slightly modified and began to use DNS spoofing on a mass scale - for any "censored" DNS names like www.youtube.com or www.facebook.com, GWF sends fake DNS replies aimed at seemingly random IP addresses outside of China[2]. This results in massive disruptions for internet users in China and massive overload of random webservers outside of China.
= Why the Government of China is doing it =
Internet censorship in China is a known fact for very long. At least 18,000 websites are blocked from within mainland China,[60] including 12 out of the Top 100 Global Websites.
DNS spoofing allows the Chinese censors to do the following:
* Block access to specific sites.
* It can cause users with specific IP addresses or locations (i.e. neighbourhood, city, district) to connect to "fake" websites and intercept their user credentials. Imagine a fake Facebook or Gmail page which looks identical to the original one, but captures login credentials. With that information, the Chinese censors can access or read your private data, emails, contacts without you noticing.
* Block SSL certificate verification queries sent by the browsers (Online Certificate Status Protocol, OCSP)
* Attack websites by directing mass traffic from many Chinese users.