Hacks and CyberEspionage [Archive]

calikid

04-13-2015, 03:23 PM

Freedom of the press, a highly regarded right in many countries, is not so prized in China.
'Great Cannon of China' turns internet users into weapon of cyberwar

Researchers identify new tool in Chinese internet censorship, first used in late March against free-speech activists GreatFire.org

The “Great Cannon” has entered the cyberwar lexicon alongside the “Great Firewall of China” after a new tool for censorship in the nation was named and described by researchers from the University of Toronto.

The first use of the Great Cannon came in late March, when the coding site GitHub was flooded by traffic leaving it intermittently unresponsive for multiple days. The attack, using a method called “distributed denial of service” or DDoS, appeared to be targeting two specific users of the site: the New York Times’ Chinese mirror, and anti-censorship organisation GreatFire.org.

Both users focus their efforts on allowing Chinese residents to bypass the country’s Great Firewall – the system China uses to restrict access to parts of the internet.

The attack, which continued for almost two weeks, was observed by researchers led by the University of Toronto’s Bill Marczak. They concluded that it provides evidence of a new censorship tool above and beyond the Great Firewall.

“While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the ‘Great Cannon’,” the researchers write.

“The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but 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.”
Story Continues (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/13/great-cannon-china-internet-users-weapon-cyberwar)