Bringing A Cannon To A Knife Fight

by Adam Kozy & Johannes Gilger

Chinas Great Cannon (GC), the offensive standalone system that serves as a complement to its defensive Great Firewall (GFW), debuted with a bang in early 2015, carrying out massive attacks on anti-censorship site Greatfire.org and everyones favorite code-sharing resource, Github. Not cool, man...

This talk aims to examine Chinas destructive new toy and its methods for turning both Chinese users and global visitors to Chinese sites into the worlds largest botnet. We'll review the Great Cannons early construction, examine how it intercepts traffic as a Man-in-the-Middle proxy by doing live probe requests to the GC & GFW to determine the difference between their traffic, and show the relative ease with which it can further weaponize users to carry out attacks on sites deemed a threat to the Chinese Communist Party. Arguably as important as comprehending the methods by which the Great Cannon functions is understanding the WHY we intend to walk you through why the GC made an appearance at the time it did, the political underpinnings behind the decision to attack the Github repos, and how you can expect to see it change in the future as HTTPS and DNSSEC become more widely used.

Are you wondering how to protect your company's traffic even if you use Baidu Ads or communicate with Chinese servers? Yep, we'll cover that too.

Although the GC was wielded with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer during its debut, it is certainly capable of being a much more devious and dangerous tool to suppress perceived threats in a targeted and hard-to-detect fashion. Needless to say, it won't be going away anytime soon. Bulletproof yourself by attending this talk and learning all about Chinas Great Cannon.