{"id":46533,"date":"2015-04-11T23:08:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T23:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=46533 "},"modified":"2015-04-11T23:08:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T23:08:00","slug":"46533-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=46533","title":{"rendered":"China Deploys New Online Weapon in Internet Censorship Game: Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><\/div><div>2015-04-10 &nbsp;<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/mzzg.org\/UploadCenter\/ArticlePics\/2015\/15\/20154128a4bb71f-a723-4503-8aee-ba7bbbc3f125.jpeg\" alt=\"20154128a4bb71f-a723-4503-8aee-ba7bbbc3f125.jpeg (622&#215;402)\" \/><br \/><div><\/div><div>A man surfs the Internet at a coffee shop in Beijing in a file photo.<\/div><div>&nbsp;AFP<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div>China has added a powerful new weapon in its battle to control what its users see online, adding the &#8220;Great Cannon&#8221; to its existing arsenal of blocks, filters and human censorship known collectively as the Great Firewall, a new report said on Friday.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>Led by researchers at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto, the report analyzes in technical detail exactly how a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on anti-censorship site GreatFire.org and coding website GitHub unfolded earlier this month.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>&#8220;China&#8217;s &#8216;Great Cannon&#8217; [is] our term for an attack tool that we identify as separate from, but co-located with, the Great Firewall of China,&#8221; the report said.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>&#8220;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,&#8221; it said.<\/div><div><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div>According to the report, the attack on GitHub and GreatFire.org is the first known usage of the Great Cannon.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>The attack on the sites, which both hosted tools to users wishing to circumvent Chinese Internet censorship, was carried out by &#8220;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,&#8221; the report said.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>The Cannon works by silently programming the browsers of users outside China to create a massive DDoS attack.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>&#8220;The Great Cannon clearly [affords] China the opportunity to deliver exploits targeting any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing [a secure connection],&#8221; it said.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>The report draws parallels between the Great Cannon and the U.S. National Security Agency&#8217;s &#8220;Quantum&#8221; program, first revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>The report said it would be a &#8220;trivial&#8221; task to repurpose the Great Cannon to attack the computers of users whose browsers were weaponized in the GitHub attack, it said.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>GreatFire.org last month said it was &#8220;confident&#8221; that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) was responsible for both DDoS attacks.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>It said Beijing has shifted its focus from enforcing strict censorship in China to enforcing Chinese censorship on Internet users worldwide.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>Youth league<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div>The report was issued a day after it emerged that China&#8217;s ruling Communist Party&#8217;s Youth League is actively recruiting some 10 million online web opinion-makers, known colloquially as the 50-cent army, to post pro-government articles, videos and tweets.<\/div><div><\/div><div><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div><\/div><div><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rfa.org\/english\/news\/china\/weapon-04102015110520.html\">For detail please visit here<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&lt;div&gt;&quot;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,&quot; it said.&lt;\/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}