Princeton Researcher and Collaborators Shed Light on China's Great Cannon

Late last March, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was launched against GitHub, apparently for hosting Greatfire.org, a site that mirrors censored content from the BBC and the New York Times, making it accessible in China.  

 

Originally, the consensus was that the "Great Firewall," a part of China's online apparatus for censoring internet content was to blame.  However, a research group consisting of Princeton's Roya Ensafi (a post doc in Computer Science) as well as researchers from ICSI, UC Berkeley, and the Citizen Lab recently discovered that the attack was launched by new censorship infrastructure they have called the "Great Cannon."  Ensafi and her colleagues showed that the Great Cannon is used to run man-in-the-middle and inject malicious JavaScript code into web pages fetched by innocent Internet users connecting to servers belong to the Chinese search engine baidu.com.