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from the Take-the-second-exit-and-head-directly-west-over-the-ocean dept.
The Sydney Morning Herald has a front-page story detailing apparent Chinese redirection and interception of Australian internet traffic.
Internet traffic heading to Australia was diverted via mainland China over a six-day period last year. The diverted traffic from Europe and North America was logged as a routing error by the state-owned China Telecom, according to data released for the first time by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Naval War College in the US.
The targeting of data bound for Australia comes amid revelations China's peak security agency has overseen a surge in cyber attacks on Australian companies over the past year, breaching a bilateral agreement to not steal each other's commercial secrets.
The re-directions happened between the 7th and 13th of June last year and resulted in a small portion of the total internet traffic coming into Australia taking up to six times longer to arrive as it went via China. One of the researchers, says he believes the target of the attack was a UK cyber-security company with offices in Australia.
The data diversions were possible as China Telecom has 10 Points of Presence (PoPs) in North America. Foreign carries have no comparable infrastructure across mainland China.
China Telecom has long been regarded as a passive service provider, despite being state-owned, and therefore has attracted none of the suspicion of Chinese telecommunications providers like Huawei or ZTE.
In the research paper quoted in the article, three other examples of such diversions over the past two years are highlighted, including traffic from Scandinavia to the Japanese office of a major US media outlet being diverted via China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @06:12AM (2 children)
> Big bad guy finds a giant .zip of company's codebase in an Email attachment sent from one engineer to another.
That's on Microsoft. They killed file sharing and now people use e-mail as a problem-filled work-around to replace what Microsoft took away. Some newer people have never seen or heard of file sharing but still know they want to get files from one person to another and since there is no other option, e-mail it is. The safety is even worse when companies outsource their e-mail to third-parties.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @09:59AM
No other option?, oh, come on! even the technochallenged muppets at my last place of employ had gotten round to using Dropbox to share files without any prompting (admittedly, once this was discovered, it was then a complete waste of time getting them to grok the further ideas of encrypting/password protecting these files and deleting them after a couple of days/weeks/when finished with, I bet there's still stuff being shared there from a couple of years ago).
Mind you, it's a game you can't win. In a past existence, as a postmaster@some.site, I had to deal with a certain class of idiot who thought it a good idea to send large amounts of 'sensitive' data relating to the testing of unclear(sic) warheads via unencrypted email despite a whole secure filesharing infrastructure having been put in place to avoid this sort of thing in the first place (a mix of temporary guest and fixed 'Project' accounts on a single exposed machine with external scp/sftp access).
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:00PM
Has FTP died? And, shared drives? Direct links?
Wait, I'm sorry. You're probably talking about John Q. Office Drone. (I always hated pretentious pricks with four name.) He doesn't know how any of that stuff works, and that's why the IT department won't grant him the rights necessary to do any of it.