Leaks in over 100,000 documents suggest a little-known Chinese company has been quietly selling seemingly modeled censorship systems A great firewall To governments around the world.
Geedge Networks, a company founded in 2018, sees China’s “father” of massively scrutinized infrastructure as one of its investors, as a network surveillance provider, providing customers with commercial-grade cybersecurity tools to “provide customers with comprehensive visibility and minimize security risks.” In fact, researchers have found that it has been operating a complex system that allows users to monitor online information, block certain websites and VPN tools, and monitor specific individuals.
Researchers who reviewed leaked materials found that the company was able to package advanced surveillance capabilities into commercialized versions of large firewalls that belong to commercialization, a wholesale solution with hardware that can be installed in any telecom data center and software run by local government officials. The documents also discuss the desired features companies are engaging in, such as cyberattacks for you to use and certain users’ geographic applications.
According to leaked documents, Geedge has operated in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Myanmar, as well as another unidentified country. Wired found that public job releases indicated that Geedge was also looking for engineers who could travel to other countries for engineering work, including to several unnamed countries in the unrevealed documents.
These files, including JIRA and Confluence entries, source code, and communications with Chinese academic institutions, mainly involve internal technical documents, operational logs and communications to solve problems and add functionality. The documents provided by anonymous leaks were conducted by a consortium organized by human rights and media, including Amnesty International, Interseclab, Myanmar Justice, Paper Off-Road Media, Global Media and Mail, TOR TOR PROVECT, TOR TOR PROVECT, OUSTIAL NEPTICT DER Standard, and followed the money.
“This is not a legal interception like every country does, including Western democracies,” said Marla Rivera, a technical researcher at Interseclab, a global digital forensics research firm. In addition to the massive censorship, the system allows governments to target specific individuals based on their website activities, such as visiting a certain field.
Rivera said the surveillance system for sale by Geedge “gives so much power to the government that no one should actually have it.” “It’s very scary.”
Digital authoritarianism as a service
The heart of Geedge’s product is a gateway tool called Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), designed to sit in a data center and can be scaled to handle internet traffic throughout the country, the file shows. According to the researchers, every packet of Internet traffic can be scanned, filtered or stopped. In addition to monitoring the entire traffic, the document also shows that the system allows other rules to be set for specific users it considers suspicious and collects its network activity.
For unencrypted internet traffic, the system is able to block sensitive information such as website content, passwords and email attachments, based on leaked documents. If the content is correctly encrypted through the Transport Layer Security protocol, the system uses deep packet inspection and machine learning techniques to extract metadata from encrypted traffic and predict whether it is undergoing censorship evasion tools such as VPNs. If it cannot distinguish the content of encrypted traffic, the system can also choose to mark it as suspicious and block it for a while.
