A team including Roya Ensafi, a Princeton University CITP affiliate and computer science postdoc, has identified a new attack tool used by China in recent DDoS attacks on GitHub and GreatFire.org. Ensafi collaborated with researchers at the Citizen Lab, the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), and UC Berkeley. They have named the tool the “Great Cannon” and discovered that, though the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, it is a separate offensive system with the capability to perform man-in-the-middle attacks that arbitrarily replace unencrypted content. More details can be found in today’s The New York Times article or on the Citizen Lab website.