China has weaponized the Great Firewall, says a free-speech group

A nonprofit group developing tools to get around Chinese online censorship says the Chinese government is behind a recent attack that sent a flood of traffic to its site and services. China is effectively using the national firewall in place to censor the Internet for Chinese residents to weaponize the browsers of millions of global Internet users, according to GreatFire.

Earlier this month, the group announced that it was facing a significant distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, that was directing 2.6 billion requests per hour to its Web pages. Web sites aren't set up to handle that magnitude of traffic,  and such attacks are typically aimed a knocking sites offline. Last week, a similar attack appears to have struck at popular code collaboration platform GitHub — specifically targeting GreatFire projects hosted on the site and making the whole platform intermittently available for some users.