China is getting even tougher with its Internet censorship efforts past its borders, creating a new strategy known as the “Great Cannon” that aims to attack websites that are helping people circumvent the “Great Firewall.”

A report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto found that the Great Cannon is more than just an extension of the Great Firewall, but is indeed a “distinct attack tool” that attempts to hijack traffic from individual IP addresses, according to a Agence France-Presse report.

It mirrors claims by an activist organization known as GreatFire, which claims last month that China was attempting to shut down websites that were mirroring content from blocked websites. It involves hijacking the traffic to the Chinese search engine Baidu and then sending the traffic on denial-of-service attacks to flood a website in order to cause it to crash.

It is a brand new, ambitious escalation in information control by the Chinese government, which is using it to enforce censorship and turning individual users into cyber weapons, the report states.

The Great Cannon can take over traffic of “bystander systems” and foreign computers that communicate with a China-based website that is not fully using encryption, according to the report.

Beijing denies being involved in these attacks, but the Citizen Lab found that there was a great deal of evidence that it does, including sharing code and infrastructure with the Great Firewall.

The report notes that using the Great Cannon is a big shift in tactics that would have required approval at the highest levels of governments.

The Great Cannon is believed to be behind the crash of GitHub, which is a software collaboration website that is used by Chinese dissidents to get around censorship.

The attack tool is similar to the U.S. National Security Agency’s Quantum program as described in leaks by Edward Snowden.

The researchers indicated that they were “puzzled” by the decision to make the Great Cannon so publicly visible.