China is reportedly taking Internet censorship to a new level with a new cyberweapon.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto released a report on Friday about the weapon, which they called "the Great Cannon" and was first used last week in an attack against anti-censorship site GreatFire and popular San Francisco-based service GitHub, according to The Washington Post.
The attack was known as a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), in which China created Internet traffic that kept users within the country from accessing news stories and websites that the government doesn't approve of.
The Citizen Lab said in its report that the Great Cannon is a seperate tool from the Great Firewall, the censorship system that China has been using for quite some time to keep its citizens from viewing content it deems inappropriate. However, both tools work in the same infrastructure and share some computer code. Other moves the country has taken to control citizens' online activities include proposing earlier this year that foreign tech companies provide the keys to their encryption systems in order to operate in China, a move that has reportedly been put on hold.
The researchers also believe that creating Internet traffic is only one of this new weapon's capabilities, and that it could also use harmful codes to infect computers visiting China's websites that don't use encryption to keep users' privacy safe, the Washington Post reported.
James A. Lewis, senior fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studios, says online censorship has become a larger focus for China while President Xi Jinping has been in charge, as Jinping has been pushing for domestic stability in the country.
"Getting control over the Internet and information is a big priority for the Chinese- they're going after things they used to tolerate, and you're seeing a general clampdown," Lewis said.
State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach said the U.S. government is concerned about the situation, as such attacks against its companies and customers put the national security and economy of the U.S. in danger.
"In this case, the attackers appeared to have leveraged Internet infrastructure located in China to overwhelm Web sites in the United States," Gerlach said, adding that U.S. officials have asked China to investigate the attacks.
The Citizen Lab team says that encrypting more Web traffic is the best way to disable the Great Cannon, the Washington Post reported. Nicholas Weaver, one of the report's authors, said this process must be done on a universal level.
"We are now in a world where any unencrypted traffic seen by an adversary is not just an information leak, but a weakness they can exploit," Weaver said.
The Chinese Embassy has yet to comment on the Citizen Lab report or the attacks with the Great Cannon.
