A New Internet Censorship Weapon Called “The Great Cannon”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/shyamanthaasokan/china-has-a-new-internet-censorship-weapon-called-the-great#.msXLvlnxX5

Basically, while the the Great Firewall can only block foreign websites at home, the Great Cannon can actively attack them by directing overwhelming amounts of traffic at them, the report’s authors say. It can therefore be used to target foreign websites that people in China currently use to get around censorship rules.

The new weapon was used last month against Greatfire.org, a website that runs mirror images of sites that are blocked inside China, according to the report by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab project.

The report says the Great Cannon is similar to Quantum, a tool developed and used by the U.S. and U.K.’s security agencies. They appear to use the tool for surveillance, whereas China appears to use the Great Cannon for aggressive censorship, the New York Times reported.

China’s government and internet regulator have repeatedly denied that the country carries out cyber attacks. China’s largest search engine, Baidu — whose servers the report says were intercepted in the attack against Greatfire.org — denies that its servers were compromised.