Massive Leak Shows How a Chinese Company Is Exporting the Great Firewall to the World

A leak of more than 1,5 documents shows that a small -known Chinese company is silently selling sensorship systems to model. Firewall In governments around the world.

Gidges Networks, a company founded in 2018, which calculates as one of the investors in the “father” of China’s huge sensorship infrastructure, style as a network-monitoring supplier, provides “business-grade cybersiciity equipment” to achieve “broad visibility and reduce security risk” for its customers. In fact, researchers have discovered that it is operating a sophisticated system that allows users to monitor online information, block specific websites and VPN equipment, and to spy specific people.

Researchers who have reviewed the leaked material have discovered that the company has been able to pack up advanced surveillance capacity as a commercialization version of the Great Firewall – a wholesale solution with hardware that can be installed in a telecom data center and the software operated by local government officials. In the documents, the company also discusses the preferred functions such as cybattack-rent and geofening specific users.

According to the leaked documents, Gaid has already launched an operation in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Myanmar, as well as in another unknown country. A public job posting has shown that Gidage is also looking for engineers who can travel to other countries for engineering work, not even naming the leaked documents, but found wired.

Files with cumin and confluence entry, source code and correspondence with a Chinese academic organization are mostly involved in solving problems with internal technical documentation, operation log and communication and association. Provided by anonymous leaks, a consortium of human rights and media agencies and Amnesty International, Myanmar’s justice, paper trail media, The Globe and Mail, The Toe Project, Austrian newspaper’s Day Standard and followed by a consortium.

“This is not a legal barrier, which is not a legal barrier that does every country with Western democracy,” said Global Digital Forensic Research Institute Intercechlab Technical Researchers. In addition to the mass censorship, the system allows the government to visit a specific domain that targets specific persons based on the activities of their website.

Rivera says that the surveillance system that is selling the guideline is “the government gives so much power that no one should really have,” Rivera says. “It’s very scary.”

Digital authoritarianism as a service

There is a gateway equipment called Tiangu Secure Gateway (TSG) in the main part of the offer of the guidz, which is designed to sit inside the data centers and can be scales for the entire country’s Internet traffic process, publishing documents. According to researchers, every packet of internet traffic passes through it, where it can be scanned, filtered or stopped directly. In addition to the entire traffic observation, the documents show that the system allows specific users to set additional rules that it seems suspicious and collects their network activities.

For an unprecedented internet traffic, the system is able to prevent sensitive information such as website content, password and email attachment as per the leaked document. If the content is properly encrypted through the transport layer security protocol, the system uses deep packets and machine learning techniques to extract the metadata from encrypted traffic and predicts whether it is through a Censorship Circination System like a VPN. If it cannot distinguish the contents of the encrypted traffic, the system can flagge it as suspicious and block it for time.