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China's new cyber weapon 'Great Cannon' uncovered
/ Screen capture from YouTube
By Ko Dong-hwan
Researchers have discovered China’s latest cyber warfare weapon that they have dubbed “the Great Cannon.”
Researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, the International Computer Science Institute, the University of California-Berkeley and Princeton University uncovered the cyber weapon, online media reported Monday.
The researchers identified the Great Cannon as “a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to individual IP addresses and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle,” the report said.
When the Great Cannon software is launched, any web user visiting an unencrypted Chinese website could unwillingly be used as a tool for cyber warfare. The attack injects a code into the web user’s computer before they reach the website that causes their computer to be part of a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack.
The Great Cannon not only unleashes cyber attacks by using its internal coding to redirect traffic to launch assaults on unsuspecting web victims, it can be used for surveillance. The weapon was similar to the Quantum system, which the National Security Agency and British authorities use for targeted surveillance, the report said.
The researchers also found that the Great Cannon was behind the DDos attack a few weeks ago on Github, the web-based Git repository hosting service. This attack targeted pages owned by pro-Chinese free speech websites and blocked traffic communication. It is different from the Great Firewall, a censoring filter the Chinese national government imposes on all domestic websites to discourage Chinese citizens from visiting western media sites.
The researchers fear the Great Cannon could further develop into a spying tool.
“The Great Cannon could be used to spy on anyone who happens to get content hosted on a Chinese computer, even by visiting a non-Chinese website that contains Chinese advertising content,” the report said, quoting The New York Times.
One of the researchers, Nicholas Weaver of UC Berkeley, was concerned about how the DDos attack tool could simply change into a spying tool and “exploit individual computers.”