[ISN] Facebook traffic mysteriously passes through Chinese ISP

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 01:10:38 -0600 (CST)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/23/facebook_traffic_china_telecom/

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
The Register
23rd March 2011

For a short time on Tuesday, internet traffic sent between Facebook and 
subscribers to AT&T's internet service passed through hardware belonging 
to the state-owned China Telecom before reaching its final destination, 
a security researcher said.

An innocent routing error is the most likely explanation for the highly 
circuitous route, but it's troubling nonetheless. said Barrett Lyon, the 
independent researcher who helped discover the anomaly and later blogged 
about it. Human rights groups have long accused China's government of 
snooping on the internet communications of dissidents, and last year 
Google claimed it and dozens of other companies were on the receiving 
end of a sophisticated hacking campaign carried out by the Chinese.

During a window that lasted 30 minutes to an hour Tuesday morning, all 
unencrypted traffic passing between AT&T customers and Facebook might 
have been open to similar monitoring. Lyon said he has no evidence any 
data was in fact snarfed, but he said the potential for that is 
certainly there because the hardware belonged to China Telecom, which in 
turn is owned by the Chinese government.

“This kind of thing happens all the time, sometimes on accident and 
sometimes on purpose,” he told The Reg. “I think people should talk 
about it at the very least.”

[...]


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Received on Wed Mar 23 2011 - 00:10:38 PDT

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