Github Attack Perpetrated by China’s Great Cannon Traffic Injection Tool
Maybe it’s time for nations to respond.
Chinese attackers used the Great Firewall’s offensive sister-system, named the Great Cannon, to launch a recent series of distributed denial of service attacks targeting the anti-censorship site, GreatFire.org, and the code repository, Github, which was hosting content from the former.
The first set of DDoS attacks hit GreatFire.org on March 16. On March 26, Github became an unwitting victim in the attack, as another DDoS knocked it offline. It is widely believed that the attackers launched these attacks in an attempt to shut down services aimed at circumventing China’s massive content blocking infrastructure, known as the Great Firewall. The University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs’ Citizen Lab, along with help from the International Computer Science Institute, the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University, began quietly monitoring the attacks on March 18 and continued to watch the events unfold until April 8.
China’s Great Firewall doesn’t really operate as a barrier at all. Rather, the Great Firewall monitors connections between China and the global Internet for banned content, which it blocks by injecting forged TCP reset packets that cause both the sender and the recipient communications to stop and, in turn, blocks banned traffic.
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