The United States said on Friday it has asked Beijing to investigate reports that China interfered with Internet content hosted outside the country and used it to attack U.S. websites.
State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said :
We are concerned by reports that China has used a new cyber capability to interfere with the ability of worldwide Internet users to access content hosted outside of China
“The cyber attack manipulated international web traffic intended for one of China’s biggest web services companies and turned it into malicious traffic directed at U.S. sites,” Rathke told a news briefing.
He said the United States asked Chinese authorities to investigate the cyber attack and report its findings.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied it has anything to do with hacking.
China’s Great Cannon is a distinct cyber attack tool that hijacks traffic to or from individual IP addresses and allows China to target “any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website,” according to an analysis from information technology research group Citizen Lab of Toronto.
Justin W. Clarke, a senior security researcher at Cylance cybersecurity firm, called the Great Cannon a “potentially devastating tool” that is “one of the biggest cyber weapons that has become publicly known.”
Every user in China could be potentially weaponized by their government
In March, U.S. coding site GitHub said it was deflecting most of the traffic from a days-long cyberattack that had caused intermittent outages for the social coding site.
