A leakage of more than 100,000 documents shows that an unknown Chinese company was quietly selling censorship systems in the same way on the Great Wall of Governments worldwide.
The documents show that Geedge Networks, a company founded in 2018, is considered the “father” of the huge monitoring infrastructure in China as one of its investors, as a provider to confront the network, as it provides cybersecurity tools of commercial degree “to gain a comprehensive vision and reduce security risks” to its customers. In fact, the researchers found that it operates an advanced system that allows users to monitor information online information, ban some websites and VPN tools, and spy on specific individuals.
The researchers who reviewed the leaked materials found that the company is able to collect advanced monitoring capabilities to up to a marketing version of the Great Protection Wall – a wholesale solution with both the device that can be installed in any contact information center and a program run by local government employees. The documents also discuss the required jobs that the company is working on, such as Cyber-Hourch-For-Hire and Geofencing some users.
According to the leaked documents, Geedge has already entered into an operation in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Myanmar, as well as an unidentified country. The publication of public jobs shows that Geedge is also looking for engineers who can travel to other countries for engineering work, including many countries that have not been named in the leaked documents.
Files include, including Jira and Confluence, source code, correspondence with a Chinese academic institution, often internal technical documentation, operating records and communications to solve problems and add jobs. Through an unknown leakage, files were studied by a consortium from human rights and media organizations including Amnesty International, Interseclab, Justice in Myanmar, Terry Media, Blaby, Post, Tor Project, and Austrian Deir Standers, and tracking money.
“This is not like the legal objection that each country, including Western democracies, says,” says Marla Rivera, technical researcher at Interseclab, a global forensic research institution. In addition to collective censorship, the system allows governments to target specific individuals based on the activities of their website, such as visiting a specific field.
Rivera says that Geedge’s monitoring system “gives a lot of power to the government to the point that no one should be no one.” “This is very scary.”
Digital tyranny as a service
At the essence of Geedge show, there is a gateway called Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), designed to sit in data centers and can be limited to processing online traffic in an entire country. According to researchers, every package of traffic on the Internet passes through it, as it can be wiped, nomination or stopped directly. In addition to monitoring the entire traffic, documents show that the system also allows the preparation of additional rules for specific users who consider it suspicious and collect their network activities.
For the non -encrypted traffic on the Internet, the system is able to intercept sensitive information such as site content, passwords and email attachments, according to the leaked documents. If the content is properly encrypted by the transport layer safety protocol, the system uses deep examination and machine learning techniques to extract descriptive data from encrypted traffic and predicting whether it passes through a tool surrounding control such as VPN. If he cannot distinguish between encrypted traffic content, the system can also choose to refer to it as suspicious and ban for a period of time.