March 24, 2011 5:10 PM PDT
Facebook detour through China: Accident or not?
by <http://www.cnet.com/profile/elinormills/> Elinor Mills
Barrett Lyon's blog revealed that traffic destined for Facebook was
mysteriously re-routed through China.
(Credit:
<http://www.blyon.com/hey-att-customers-your-facebook-data-went-to-china-and
-korea-this-morning/> Blyon.com)
A funny thing happened to some traffic heading to Facebook earlier this
week. It ended up going out of the way through China.
Barrett Lyon, an entrepreneur and network security expert who blogged about
the incident on Tuesday, suggested it was merely an accident. But Rodney
Joffe, senior technologist at DNS (Domain Name System) registry Neustar,
disagrees and described it as "route hijacking."
"It's real. It is happening. It can't be described as an 'accident'
anymore," Joffe, who observed similar traffic snafus involving China
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20019093-245.html> last year, said in an
e-mail to CNET today.
China is notorious for its efforts at censoring the Internet, and free
speech activists worry about the government being able to snoop on citizens'
Internet communications, although what officials there would want with U.S.
citizens' traffic is anyone's guess.
Here's what happened, according to
<http://www.blyon.com/hey-att-customers-your-facebook-data-went-to-china-and
-korea-this-morning/> Lyon's post:
"Quietly this morning customers of AT&T browsing Facebook did so by way of
China then Korea. Typically, AT&T customers' data would have routed over the
AT&T network directly to Facebook's network provider, but due to a routing
mistake their private data went first to Chinanet then via Chinanet to SK
Broadband in South Korea, then to Facebook. This means that anything you
looked at via Facebook without encryption was exposed to anyone operating
Chinanet, which has a very suspect modus operandi."
In his analysis, Lyon speculates that most likely nothing happened to the
data.
"Yet China is well known for its harmful networking practices by limiting
network functionality and spying on its users, and when your data is flowing
over their network, your data could be treated as any Chinese citizens.'
Does that include capturing your session ID information, personal
information, emails, photos, chat conversations, mappings to your friends
and family, etc? One could only speculate, however it's possible."
Lyon also questions whether Facebook or AT&T should have notified customers
of the problem, whether Facebook should enable SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
encryption by default (
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20029670-245.html> that became an option
in early February), and whether high-profile sites should be allowed to
route to non-authenticated networks.
"This happens all the time--the Internet is just not a trusted network," he
wrote. "Yet I prefer to know that when I am on AT&T's network, going to
U.S.-located sites, my packets are not accidentally leaving the country and
being subject to another nation's policies."
Read more:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20046338-245.html#ixzz1HcxITfgN>
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20046338-245.html#ixzz1HcxITfgN
----------------------------------------------------------
Did China reroute Facebook traffic?
Elinor Mills CNET News | March 25, 2011 7:30 AM PDT
Some traffic heading to Facebook earlier this week ended up going out
through China. Barrett Lyon, an entrepreneur and network security expert who
blogged about the incident on Tuesday, suggested it was merely an accident.
But Rodney Joffe, senior technologist at DNS (Domain Name System) registry
Neustar, disagrees and described it as "route hijacking."
"It's real. It is happening. It can't be described as an 'accident'
anymore," Joffe, who observed similar traffic snafus involving China last
year, said in an e-mail to CNET today.
Here's what happened,
<http://www.blyon.com/hey-att-customers-your-facebook-data-went-to-china-and
-korea-this-morning/> according to Lyon's post:
"Quietly this morning customers of AT&T browsing Facebook did so by way of
China then Korea. Typically, AT&T customers' data would have routed over the
AT&T network directly to Facebook's network provider, but due to a routing
mistake their private data went first to Chinanet then via Chinanet to SK
Broadband in South Korea, then to Facebook. This means that anything you
looked at via Facebook without encryption was exposed to anyone operating
Chinanet, which has a very suspect modus operandi."
Current hardware partners will not be affected by the decision. Motorola
just launched the first Honeycomb tablet, the Xoom, in the US; and Samsung,
Dell, HTC and Acer are expected to follow suit with tablets of their own.
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