industryterm:internet monitoring

Great news: #surveillance works !

“Knowing one’s online activities are subject to government interception and believing these surveillance practices are necessary for national security play important roles in influencing conformist behavior”

▻http://motherboard.vice.com/read/chilling-effect-of-mass-surveillance-is-silencing-dissent-online-s

Internal Internet traffic routed outside Russia by a Chinese operator

The Russian Internet traffic in several circumstances has been re-routed outside the country, the incidents seem to be caused by routing errors made by China Telecom.

The news has been published by the Internet monitoring service Dyn in a blog post, which also reports that domestic traffic was re-routed apparently due to a networking fault caused by a weakness in the Border gateway protocol (#BGP).

However, as can often happen with these [peering] relationships, one party can leak the routes received from the other and effectively insert itself into the path of the other party’s Internet communications. This happened over a dozen times in the past year between these two providers. This is a general phenomenon that occurs with some regularity but isn’t often discussed in BGP security literature. In this blog post, we’ll explore the issue via the lens of this single example. In a follow-on blog, we’ll explore several additional examples.

The original article below gives a fairly comprehensive explanation of peering and what can go wrong. It also explains the #Vimpelcom and #China_Telecom peering agreement and shows how it went wrong on several occasions. (eg China Telecom announcing full tables)
▻http://research.dyn.com/2014/11/chinese-routing-errors-redirect-russian-traffic

http://research.dyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/normal_ops.gif http://research.dyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/leak_scenario1.gif http://research.dyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/leak_scenario2.gif

The above article also references the following very good and self-explanatory read that explains BGP prefix hijacking, and available security measures:

Why Is It Taking So Long to Secure Internet Routing?

People have been aware of BGP’s security issues for almost two decades and have proposed a number of solutions, most of which apply simple and well-understood cryptography or whitelisting techniques. Yet, many of these solutions remain undeployed (or incompletely deployed) in the global Internet, and the vulnerabilities persist. Why is it taking so long to secure BGP?

▻http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2668966

Thus, while we continue to make progress toward protocol-based defenses for routing security, the next frontier in routing security could very well be hardening the software and hardware used in Internet routers.

#RPKI
#BGPSEC
#routing #security

Report: Web monitoring devices made by U.S. firm #Blue_Coat detected in #Iran, #Sudan - The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/report-web-monitoring-devices-made-by-us-firm-blue-coat-detected-in-iran-sudan/2013/07/08/09877ad6-e7cf-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html

American-made devices used for Internet monitoring have been detected on government and commercial computer networks in Iran and Sudan, in apparent violation of U.S. sanctions that ban the sale of goods, services or technology to the autocratic states, according to new research.

#surveillance

#OpSyria : When the Internet does not let citizens down | KheOps
►http://reflets.info/opsyria-when-the-internet-does-not-let-citizens-down

We wrote a lot about Syria’s Internet monitoring and censorship. We saw how the authorities, with the (possibly indirect) support of the BlueCoat manufacturer, spied on a vast majority of their population in order to arrest potential opponents. This notably led to some activists being tortured in order to obtain their Facebook or Gmail credentials, in turns allowing authorities to track down their friends and relatives. Although it is still evolving and requires continuous attention, this dark situation has already been widely described and criticised, but very little attention has been paid to what could be done to improve people’s communications condition. However, there exist people from here and there who have been trying to re-build secured communication channels. The underlying idea - maybe a bit idealistic - being that freedom of expression should be guaranteed for everybody, and that any person should have the ability to collect as many elements as they want in order to make up their mind on any to