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We had two Soylents send us news of a new tactic in state-sponsored attempts at silencing undesired content on the internet:
China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet.
Late last month, China began flooding American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic in an apparent effort to take out services that allow China’s Internet users to view websites otherwise blocked in the country.
Initial security reports suggested that China had crippled the services by exploiting its own Internet filter — known as the Great Firewall — to redirect overwhelming amounts of traffic to its targets. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto say China did not use the Great Firewall after all, but rather a powerful new weapon that they are calling the Great Cannon.
The Great Cannon, the researchers said in a report published Friday ( https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/ ), allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and re-purpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit.
The system was used, they said, to intercept web and advertising traffic intended for Baidu — China’s biggest search engine company — and fire it at GitHub, a popular site for programmers, and GreatFire.org, a nonprofit that runs mirror images of sites that are blocked inside China. The attacks against the services continued on Thursday, the researchers said, even though both sites appeared to be operating normally.
[Continued after the break.]
China's "Great Cannon" used to silence government critics
Citizen Lab, a Canadian human rights organization, published a report on what it calls the Great Cannon - a DDOS system that they say is deployed by the Chinese government. This system was allegedly used for the recent attack against GitHub.
We show that, 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 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.
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. Specifically, the Cannon manipulates the traffic of “bystander” systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack. While employed for a highly visible attack in this case, the Great Cannon clearly has the capability for use in a manner similar to the NSA’s QUANTUM system,4 affording China the opportunity to deliver exploits targeting any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing HTTPS.
(Score: 2) by Mr Big in the Pants on Sunday April 12 2015, @07:55PM
Then look it up. My understanding is that the main news orgs are owned by the government and print their propaganda verbatim.
Their propaganda, much like russia, is usually ridiculous and aimed at their citizens rather than the rest of the world. This disconnect makes for very amusing reading at times - such as during the whole Ukraine thing.
When I could be bothered looking int he past China's was usually "shrill" and utterly transparent - but perhaps they have become better at it?
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:46AM
That's such a curious statement I have to ask: did you meant to type ‘the US’ rather than ‘Russia’? Even by US sources like the DoD it is official that there is US military personnel in Ukraine and the State Department has said there are no Russian armed forces there and as the months passed even the Pentagon had to admit they were right and that there never was any evidence to the contrary.
Yeah not exactly front page stuff in western media, haven't seen any hoopla being made about how the Russians are evacuating US citizens out of Yemen either. Imagine that: if you're an American/Usian in a warzone you're better off asking the Russians for help.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by Mr Big in the Pants on Tuesday April 14 2015, @06:39AM
What complete and utter shite...
Nothing more to say on the matter...