On May 8, U.S. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke complained that China had used an offensive cyber capability “to interfere with the ability of worldwide internet users to access content hosted outside of China.” Experts feared China had hijacked traffic intended for domestic servers and re-routed to conduct a malicious attack on American sites.
In March, the American coding repository, GitHub, reported intermittent outages amid a multiday cyber attack, which redirected traffic from the popular Chinese search engine Baidu to pages linked to The New York Times Mandarin-language site and GreatFire.org — a tool utilized by Chinese netizens to steer around the Great Firewall. Both sites are banned in the mainland. Researchers say an offensive Chinese cyber attack system called the “Great Cannon,” which captures traffic in China and fires it out at offending sites, perpetrated the attack.
So how much should we worry about China’s cyber capabilities?
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