US Facebook data passed through Chinese, South Korean ISPs-ZDNet (blog)

Earlier this week, could your Facebook posts have been rewritten on the Chinese wall, not just on your friends ' walls. 30 Minutes on Tuesday morning, Facebook traffic in the United States or at least connections through AT&T .com's Internet services, not travel via the most direct route. Normally, transfer AT&T data packets to the United States-based Level3 Communications, which again fingers them away to Facebooks servers.

Instead, relations went too far: through servers owned by China Telecom, ChinaNet, mainland China State-owned Internet service provider (ISP) and then to SK broadband, a commercial ISP in South Korea, before finding their way to Facebook. Independent security researcher Barret Lyon so the change and noted:

This morning's route to Facebook from AT&T:
route-server > show IP bgp 69.171.224.13 (Facebook's www IP address)
BGP routing table entry for 69.171.224.0/20, version 32605349
Paths: (18 available, best # 6, table default IP Routing table)
Not advertised to any peer
7018 4,031 9318 32934 32934 32934

AS path (routing path) translates this:

AT&T (AS7018) ChinaNet (Data in China AS4134) SK broadband (Data in South Korea AS9318) Facebook (Data back to the American 32934)

Current route to Facebook via AT&T:
route-server > sho IP bgp 69.171.224.0/20
BGP routing table entry for 69.171.224.0/20, version 32743195
Paths: (18 available, best # 6, table default IP Routing table)
Not advertised to any peer
7018 3356 32934 32934, (received and used)

In other words, if you used Facebook on AT&T at the right time this week, was everything that is sent without encryption exposed for any operation of ChinaNet and SK broadband. Chances have been actually done anything with your data, but it is not a security.

"We shall examine a situation today, which has resulted in a small volume of a single carrier traffic to Facebook will be misdirected," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. ' We are working with the air carrier to determine the cause of the error. Our initial inspection of the latency of requests indicates that no traffic passed through China. "

I was waiting this week to see if the company would make an announcement concerning what it found, but no dice. If nothing really pass through the country, mean data went through ChinaNet server located elsewhere.

Odd route could have simply been an error in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing tables, which tells the Internet backbone routers where to send traffic. This will normally be seen as a hero, but it is not exactly rare anymore. It came to actually two times last year.

In March 2010, was traffic to sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook redirected to servers in China, gives Web surfers around the globe a glimpse of what Chinese Internet users see when they try to access the blocked sites. In November 2010, traffic for 15 percent of the world's destinations, comes from the military and civilian government networks in the UK, United States, Australia and South Korea began re-directing through China Telecom.

It is not clear if all this redirection happens with willingness to help China to collect intelligence. Of course, the Chinese Government denies such allegations. Experts are still trying to figure out how this happens and how to prevent it in the future.

Facebook can be blocked in China, but the Chinese will be able to keep your personal data in order to sell it. Then again, all just a as far as we can never understand. Either way you will probably not your posts are sent elsewhere, but Facebook, otherwise you would use a much more public service as Twitter.

Two months ago, Facebook began to offer SSL encryption and the HTTPS protection for login data. Turn off HTTPS support for your Facebook account, head to the account settings, click Change next to account security, check off the "browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) as far as possible," and then hit save. In this way, at least if the data takes a long way to go, is encrypted.

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