Report Sheds Light on New Cyber Weapon Used By China on US Sites
Friday, 10 Apr 2015 11:18 AM
China employed a previously unknown cyber weapons system in its attack on GitHub, an American coding site, according to a new report released Friday.
A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Toronto concluded the Chinese were able to use a new system, known as "The Great Cannon" to launch attacks on websites and inject malicious viruses on computers worldwide.
"On March 16, GreatFire.org observed that servers they had rented to make blocked websites accessible in China were being targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. On March 26, two GitHub pages run by GreatFire.org also came under the same type of attack. Both attacks appear targeted at services designed to circumvent Chinese censorship," said the report.
The discovery of the system, the researchers said, was a dangerous development since the tool could allow China to monitor Web users that visit Chinese websites or sites with advertising content hosted in China.
The report also provides new insight into the Chinese government's cyberwarfare efforts and the lengths to which officials will go to censor information.
"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," the researchers said.
"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 [National Security Agency's] QUANTUM system, affording China the opportunity to deliver exploits targeting any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website," they added.
The "Great Cannon" was uncovered in the course of investigating attacks against GitHub and GreatFire.org, a site that helps Chinese citizens evade the country’s massive government-run firewall.
"This is just one part of President Xi Jinping’s push to gain tighter control over the Internet and remove any challenges to the party," James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies, told The New York Times.
Earlier this month, China began a campaign to crack down on "rumors" and Internet porn, reports Foreign Policy.
"The first censorship campaign of this type began in 2013, accompanied by an ambitious crackdown on Internet 'rumors,' a vague term that covers not only rumors, lies, and libel — none of which are particularly hard to find on the Chinese web — but also content that authorities deem politically sensitive or potentially destabilizing," writes Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian.
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A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Toronto concluded the Chinese were able to use a new system, known as "The Great Cannon" to launch attacks on websites and inject malicious viruses on computers worldwide.
"On March 16, GreatFire.org observed that servers they had rented to make blocked websites accessible in China were being targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. On March 26, two GitHub pages run by GreatFire.org also came under the same type of attack. Both attacks appear targeted at services designed to circumvent Chinese censorship," said the report.
The report also provides new insight into the Chinese government's cyberwarfare efforts and the lengths to which officials will go to censor information.
"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," the researchers said.
Latest News Update
The "Great Cannon" was uncovered in the course of investigating attacks against GitHub and GreatFire.org, a site that helps Chinese citizens evade the country’s massive government-run firewall.
"This is just one part of President Xi Jinping’s push to gain tighter control over the Internet and remove any challenges to the party," James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies, told The New York Times.
Earlier this month, China began a campaign to crack down on "rumors" and Internet porn, reports Foreign Policy.
"The first censorship campaign of this type began in 2013, accompanied by an ambitious crackdown on Internet 'rumors,' a vague term that covers not only rumors, lies, and libel — none of which are particularly hard to find on the Chinese web — but also content that authorities deem politically sensitive or potentially destabilizing," writes Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian.
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