China is greatly disturbed by the ongoing pro-democracy, anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong and has been targeting all the digital forums protestors are using to organize protests. One of the favored tactics of the Chinese government is of launching a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attacks).
In September this year, HackRead reported that LIHKG, an online forum used by the activists behind Hong Kong protests suffered a series of DDoS attacks and forced it to go offline for several hours. Now, it has been revealed that it was the Chinese government that used its old and infamous DDoS tool called the Great Cannon to target LIHKG.
See: Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit by massive DDoS attacks that lasted 8 hours
China used the Great Cannon back in 2017 and it has resurfaced after a gap of two years. Previously, China targeted the New York-based Chinese news service, Mingjinnews.com with the same tool.
According to a report from AT&T Cybersecurity, the attack involving the Great Cannon was launched on August 31 and continued its activities until November 25. Using this tool, the attackers manage to successfully consumer the targeted website’s resources by bombarding it with web traffic.
This tool is believed to be an extension of the chinese great cannon resurfaces target protestors
