"Great Cannon" web disruption program said to be in development for a year

China’s “Great Cannon” traffic-redirection program, used recently to flood developer website GitHub with overwhelming Internet traffic for its hosting of anti-filtering services, has been in development for about a year, South China Morning Post reported, citing unnamed sources. The offensive counterpart to China’s Great Firewall — a national content filtering system that prevents mainland users from accessing sensitive content and services — launched the attack by hijacking Internet traffic heading for Chinese search engine Baidu and sending it to pages used by advocacy group Greatfire.org in an effort to knock those pages’ servers offline.