What is an Internet Cannon?
Many things happen in the world of technology today. Any time you mention internet censorship, the first thing that comes to my mind is the nation of China. The country has earned fame from the Great Wall of China as well as the Great firewall of China. The experts from the country have the ability to access and proceed to block a particular website indefinitely. You may be asking yourself why a government such as this one can decide to do so. One of the simple reasons for this restriction is to illegalize certain forms of speech, activities and filter certain keywords from search engines by those who may be having ill motives as far as democracy is concerned. With such actions in place, individuals who may seem to offend the nation risk facing judicial consequences the end of the day.
What is an internet cannon?
Have you ever heard something about cyber crimes and cyber criminals? An internet cannon is a special type of cyber attack tool that has the capability of hijacking traffic flow on the internet. This takes place at the national level and then there is direction of traffic to the various targeted networks. Moreover, there is spyware or malware is send to another website where traffic seems to be flowing. While using any website from the different parts of the world, you risk attack by different attackers who are ever working day and night to steal important information from you. Some of them do it for fun while other does it for financial gains. Websites that have a lot of junk traffic are at higher levels of risk of attack than any other
Also Read: What is Net Neutrality?
How does internet canon work?
Internet canon works by intercepting data that has been send between different nodes and go ahead to redirect the same to the another node. The powerful device does the balancing of analytic script that is most cases distributed by a specified search engine. The script does not necessarily mean that it is malicious. On the hand, this weapon has the ability to produce a full fledges form of attack. Similarly, it is used in intercepting emails that have not been encrypted. While talking about the internet cannon, I remembered NSA that had Quantum, which is also a tool that had the capability of redirecting individuals to fake networks with malware served by site without encryption. Other countries have also raised their concerns over the Chinese nation’s capability to access websites of foreign countries.
Many researchers have come up with claims that neutralization of the weapon is possible. However, this can only happen if the various websites do communicate through the encrypted https connections. When websites have communication encryption from end to end, it becomes very tricky to do the modification of any attacker who may be operating in between the person sending and the one receiving. Nevertheless, this may not take place in the case where the websites do not load files or the resources through the encryption that is non-HTTPS connected.
