Tag: firewall

China firewalls the cloud

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

great wallChina has expanded its Great Firewall of China to include a major hosting and cloud services company.

According to internet freedom watchdog GreatFire.org, the EdgeCast content delivery network (CDN), which “provides cloud services to thousands of websites and apps in China”, has been partially blocked.

A number of major international companies have been affected by the block, including The Atlantic, Sony Mobile, and websites related to the Firefox web browser.

Filtering escalated this week with an increasing number of popular web properties impacted and even many domains being partially blocked.

The blocking of a major CDN such as EdgeCast marks a significant escalation in the efforts of Chinese censors to keep the country’s internet free of unwanted outside influence.

Charlie Smith, founder of GreatFire, told the South China Morning Post that taking down so many sites in one go will have a huge economic impact – online commerce, trade, even academia will all be affected by this.

“While the economic cost is huge, the authorities are also risking upsetting Chinese netizens who suddenly wake up to find out that they cannot access a plethora of websites.”

The problem, as far as China is concerned, is that free speech activists and anti-censorship groups such as GreatFire have been using cloud services to create mirrors of sensitive information which cannot be blocked.

This included the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) report on the use of offshore tax havens by Chinese businessmen and officials. The report was uploaded to Amazon’s cloud servers, which, because of their design and encryption, are impossible to block on an individual website or page basis.

However killing off the entire cloud domain would cause significant harm to the businesses of the thousands of Chinese websites, including major corporations, who  depend on its services for database management and other cloud computing.

GreatFire said in a blog post since the Great Firewall cannot distinguish traffic to our mirror sites and other traffic to the cloud provider which means they cannot block access to its mirror sites without blocking access to all the sites hosted by the CDN.

It sees this as a form of ‘collateral freedom’ which hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet.

It looks like the authorities do not care and are just going to cut China off from the global internet, rather than letting that work around happen.

Ironically, China hosted the World Internet Conference in Zhejiang province. Talks include “An interconnected world shared and governed by all” and “Cross-border e-commerce and economic globalisation.”

Great Firewall of China attacks Apple

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

great wallChinese authorities are staging a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on Apple’s iCloud after previous attacks on Github, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

The man-in-the-middle attack is a form of spying in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking to each other.

According to Great Fire  the Chinese are using their Great Firewall security system to gain access to usernames and passwords and consequently all data stored on iCloud such as iMessages, photos, contacts, etc.

Unlike the recent attack on Google, this attack is nationwide and appears to be after personal data. This may also related to images and videos of the Hong Kong protests being shared on the mainland.

 

 

Internet users in China should first use a trusted browser on their desktops and mobile devices.  Firefox and Chrome will both prevent users from accessing iCloud.com when they are trying to access a site that is suffering from a MITM attack. Qihoo’s popular Chinese 360 secure browser loads the page without question.

Apple does provide security warnings, but users often ignore these – after all, they believe they are connecting to the Jobs’ Mob site itself and have been told that their software and system is totally secure.

In fact the Tame Apple Press claims that Apple is being targeted because it now offers encryption on the phone, which would keep the spooks out.  It is better for the Chinese to steal users’ passwords so they do not have to worry about having to decode the hard-drive.

Cisco throws weight behind firewall

Posted on September 16, 2014 by - News

Cisco FirewallNetworking giant Cisco claims it has introduced the first threat focused firewall.

Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services uses contextual awareness and controls to automatically assess threats, provide intelligence and improve defences to protect network.

Aimed at large enterprises, it includes Sourcefire’s Advanced Malware Protection and Next Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems.

The software management gives authorised users dashboards and drill down reports of discovered hosts, dodgy applications, threats and indicators of compromised systems.

Cisco claims its firewall is enterprise class, and supports VPN, advanced clustering and granular application layer and risk based controls.  Open source integration with Snort, OpenAppID and ClamAV let companies customise security.

No details of pricing are available.

Dell Sonicwall’s SuperMassive firewall works on LittleTiny power

Posted on March 4, 2013 by - News, Products

dellsigDell SonicWall, the acquisition that rolled the company into Dell Software Group, has announced an enterprise class firewall that promises, the firm says, to deliver robust security, performance and scalability, the SuperMassive 9000 series.

The firewall is capable of providing threat protection at multi gigabit speds with close to zero latency, Dell Sonicwall said. Included in the series are the 9600, 9400 and 9200 models which all offer IPS and application control performance in speeds up to 12Gbps. Dell claims the products are power efficient with total cost of ownership and power, space and cooling requirements optimised with specifically for enterprise data centres.

Dell rolled out a client at the University of South Florida’s Pediatrics Epidemiology Center, which said that the organisation saved heaps of cash with the investment and performance increased “10-fold” after deploying.

Dell SonicWall’s exec, Patrick Sweeney, urged companies to consider the damages volume, form and sophistication of malware can have on corporate networks. “At the same time, enterprises struggle to balance the need for network access and performance with network protection,” Sweeney said.

Dell boasted that the SuperMassive 9000 series can get to threats before they enter networks, by casting its eye on all traffic worming its way in. This is largely thanks to Dell’s Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection, or RFDPI, tech, which looks at every packet across all ports.