Various researchers have reported that China has installed a new cyberweapon for their war for Internet censorship. It is called "the Great Cannon."

Internet censorship has reached new levels in China with the introduction of the Great cannon.

Researchers from the Universities of California, Berkeley, and Toronto reported on this last Friday. It has also been reported that the cyberweapon was first used last week, attacking anti-censorship site GreatFire, as well as San Francisco-based service GitHub.

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The attack consisted of an approach rapidly approaching modern practice in the hacking world; a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).

Through this attack, China created Internet traffic that kept users from their own country from accessing websites and news stories that were deemed unacceptable or unapproved by the government.

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto added that the Great Cannon is a separate tool from the Great Firewall, which was the previous censorship system that China was using for a number of years.

While the Great Firewall is a different tool, it shares mostly the same function as the Great Cannon - which is to impose censorship on the Internet - and even the same infrastructure and computer code.

Apart from the cyberweapons China has set up, they have taken other moves to control the online activities of citizens.

One such came earlier this year, when the Chinese government proposed that foreign tech companies provide the keys to their encryption systems in order to operate in China. Since then though, the move was reportedly put on hold.

The researchers who have discovered the Great Cannon believe that creating Internet traffic is only one capability of the new cyberweapons.

They also believe that it can use harmful codes to infect computers visiting China's websites that lack the encryption needed to keep users' privacy safe.

The Chinese Embassy has yet to comment on the reports released on the Great Cannon.

TagsThe Great Cannon, University of Toronto, Citizen Lab, censorship