2015-04-10
A man surfs the Internet at a coffee shop in Beijing in a file photo.
AFP
China has added a powerful new weapon in its battle to control what its users see online, adding the “Great Cannon” to its existing arsenal of blocks, filters and human censorship known collectively as the Great Firewall, a new report said on Friday.
Led by researchers at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto, the report analyzes in technical detail exactly how a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on anti-censorship site GreatFire.org and coding website GitHub unfolded earlier this month.
“China’s ‘Great Cannon’ [is] our term for an attack tool that we identify as separate from, but co-located with, the Great Firewall of China,” the report said.
“The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users,” it said.
According to the report, the attack on GitHub and GreatFire.org is the first known usage of the Great Cannon.
The attack on the sites, which both hosted tools to users wishing to circumvent Chinese Internet censorship, was carried out by “a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle,” the report said.
The Cannon works by silently programming the browsers of users outside China to create a massive DDoS attack.
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