Security News > 2011 > March > Facebook traffic mysteriously passes through Chinese ISP

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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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/23/facebook_traffic_china_telecom/