BEIJING: China’s new cyber weapon has been designed to stop its citizens reading articles it doesn’t agree with
China is testing its new cyber weapon, taking down Github and GreatFire.org to demonstrate how it can be used to attack websites it doesn’t want its residents to read.
Now, Citizen Lab- an ICT, security and human rights lab based within the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, has come out with another finding that fingers China as the mastermind behind the Cyber-attack on Github.
According to Citizen Lab, China has developed a vicious tool named “Great Canon” which holds enough potential to carry out large scale devastation by intercepting and redirecting Internet traffic to targeted websites. In technical terms, it is known as denial-of-service attack.
The report also states that the attack on Github was carried out using the Cannon to redirect traffic from Baidu- a Chinese search engine, to cripple Github’s website. The Cannon tool takes advantage of an analytics script transported by the Baidu search engine.
Normally, this script sends data back to Baidu whenever a user visits a website that it is running on. But according to Citizen Lab, instead of sending a packet of data, Great Canon redirected the user to Github, and crashed it.
