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WASHINGTON China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers said Friday.

The new strategy, dubbed Great Cannon, seeks to shut down websites and services aimed at helping the Chinese circumvent the Great Firewall, according to a report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the Great Cannon, the report said.

The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses.

The report supports claims by the activist organization GreatFire, which last month claimed China was seeking to shut down its websites that offer mirrored content from blocked websites like those of the New York Times and others.

The technique involves hijacking Internet traffic to the big Chinese search engine Baidu and using that in denial of service attacks, which flood a website in an effort to knock it offline.

The report authors said the new tool represents a significant escalation in state-level information control by using an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users.

The Great Cannon manipulates the traffic of bystander systems including any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing (encryption).

The Citizen Lab researchers said they found compelling evidence that the Chinese government operates the GC (Great Cannon), despite Beijings denials of involvement in cyberattacks.

Because the Great Cannon shares code and infrastructure with the Great Firewall, this strongly suggests a governmental actor, said the report, which included collaboration from researchers at the University of California and Princeton University.

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Great Cannon Internet traffic diverter widens Chinese censorship powers: researchers