China had intercepted the Internet traffic of US-based websites in March this year, according to a new report released this week.

As per the report, the Asian country carried the bid in an apparent attempt to obstruct the services that allow Chinese Internet users to view these American websites that are otherwise blocked in the nation.

The report, released on Friday, was carried by the researchers and Internet experts from various institutions including, the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto, Princeton University, the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California at Berkeley.

The researchers found that GreatFire.org, the censorship monitoring and circumvention project, was attacked late March by two major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), one of which primarily aimed at the code-sharing website GitHub hosting two pages of the group.

As per the study’s findings, China carried the major hacking attempts with the help of a potent new tool, known as “the Great Cannon”.

China has so far used its own Internet filter ‘Great Firewall’ to hinder the services of foreign sites. ‘Great Firewall’ tool helped in redirecting overwhelming number of traffic to its intended location.

But the new study revealed that the Asian nation used a more powerful weapon, called ‘Great Cannon’, to attack the American websites.

In their report, the researchers wrote, “The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control. It is the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.”

According to the researchers, the new tool was different from the Great Firewall. However, both tools shared same code and network location. This was the only thing that helped the researchers to conclude that the China has a role to play in these cyber attacks.

 

A new report has revealed that China had intercepted in the Internet traffic of American websites late March in an apparent attempt to take out the services allowing Chinese web users to view these sites, which are otherwise blocked in the Asian country.

The study, which was released on Friday, was conducted by the researchers at the International Computer Science Institute, the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto, Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley.

The report said that the censorship monitoring and circumvention project, called GreatFire.org, has been targeted in March by two prominent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), one of which eyed at the code-sharing website GitHub that hosts two of the pages of the group.

According to the report, the major attacks were carried by China with the help of a potent new tool, called “the Great Cannon”.

“The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control. It is the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship,” the researchers wrote in their report.

So far, China used its own Internet filter, called Great Firewall, to cripple the services of foreign websites by redirecting overwhelming amounts of traffic to its actual target. However, the new research found that this time the Asian country opted a more powerful new weapon, which they dubbed the ‘Great Cannon’.

The researchers described the weapon as different from the Great Firewall. But they said both weapons shared same code and network location. This similarity had helped the researchers to derive the conclusion that the Chinese authorities played a big role in the attacks.

China’s new Internet weapon, which is very much similar to one developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s GCHQ, allows the Asian nation to intercept foreign Internet traffic as it flows to Chinese sites, and redirect the traffic to the site of their choice or inject malicious code in the attacked website.