The 'Great Cannon' Is China's Powerful New Hacking Weapon
WRITTEN BY LORENZO FRANCESCHI-BICCHIERAI
April 10, 2015
The relentless days-long cyberattack on GitHub showed that someone was willing to use hundreds of thousands of innocent internet users to try to take down two single pages set up by an organization fighting Chinese censorship.
A group of cybersleuths has discovered that someone is indeed China, as everyone suspected. More importantly, they’ve also learned that the attack was carried out with a powerful new cyberweapon, whose existence was previously unknown.
Researchers at the Citizen Lab—a digital watchdog at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs—are calling it the “Great Cannon.” It’s a tool essentially capable of monitoring internet traffic and targeting anyone its operators decide to hit, sending back malware or spyware, or using the target to flood another site with traffic.
“The operational deployment of the Great Cannon,” read a Citizen Lab report, published on Friday, “represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.”
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