China attacks Hong Kong Pro-democracy movement with cyber weapon
DHARAMSALA, 6 Dec: China has used the Great Cannon to disrupt pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong that gripped the island since June earlier this year.
The Great Cannon is currently attempting to take LIHKG website offline. The online forum is being used by pro-democracy movement protesters in Hong Kong to help coordinate their anti-government demonstrations, according to AT&T Cybersecurity.
The mass pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong that started with the now-scrapped anti-extradition treaty was often described as a leaderless movement powered by social media.
The Great Cannon of China is an attack tool that is used to launch distributed denial-of-service (“DDoS”) attacks on websites by intercepting massive amounts of web traffic and redirecting them to targeted websites.
Chris Doman, a security researcher at AT&T Alien Labs has said that the Great Cannon of China started the current attack on 25 November.
The researcher, however, says it is unlikely that the site will be seriously damaged as LIHKG sits behind an anti-DDoS service, and partly due to some bugs in the malicious Javascript code that he refrained from discussing in the report.
It was deployed after more than two years since the last time it was used.
Great Cannon is an addition of the Communist Regime’s censorship tool while it has utilised The Great Firewall of China, its state of the art censorship tool, to prevent the free sharing of information across the country.
The only known use of the Great Cannon was to further Chinese censorship, helmed by The Great Firewall of China, its state of the art censorship tool, to prevent the free sharing of information across the country.
While the Great Firewall of China is a (theoretically) all-seeing ‘shield’ that prevents Chinese citizens from visiting specific websites or pieces of information, the Great Cannon can compromise targeted sites and providers that were previously able to circumvent The Great Shield, giving them a new tactic in restricting the cultural influence of the west.
