SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 zocalo on Monday April 13 2015, @07:42AM
CNNIC's CA "lent" one of their root certs to a third party that used it to generate fake TLS certificates for Google domains and put them on a proxy device, e.g. they MITM'd Google's traffic. Google somehow found out and was (as might be expected) somewhat upset. The result is that to varying degrees Google, Mozilla and MS have revoked, or are in the process of revoking, the root level certificate in their browsers and other tools. CNNIC and their customers are currently going through the hassle of having to reissue a lot of certificates and CNNIC is also being required to perform various audits to demonstrate they are worthy of the trust given to a top-level CA. Soylent covered the original news here [soylentnews.org], and the response here [soylentnews.org].
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!