Remember that prolonged cyberattack that GitHub suffered last month, the one that was suspected to have been conducted by the Chinese government? Well, researchers are suggesting that this wasn’t an ordinary attack, it was the first target for what’s being called the Great Cannon, a type of cyber super weapon that China has developed using technology similar to what the NSA uses.
GitHub experienced a prolonged outage in March, and reports indicated that the site was targeted by the Chinese government because the GreatFire advocacy group uses it to host anti-censorship tools that undermine the Great Firewall. But the service wasn’t brought down by a simple distributed denial of service attack — it was the first target of what researchers call the “Great Cannon.” Citizen Lab reports that the Great Cannon is similar to, but separate from, the Great Firewall. It works by intercepting unencrypted traffic headed toward servers in China, redirecting the traffic to the government’s intended target, and using it to overwhelm whomever’s on its receiving end of its blast. The researchers say the Great Cannon represents “a significant escalation in state-level information control” because it might normalize the “widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users.” China now has both a wall to keep out its enemies and a cannon to obliterate its targets.