Sign in / up

back to article CloudFlare probes mystery interception of site traffic across India

An unknown agency in India, possibly telco Airtel, is quietly capitalising on encryption gaps in sites tended by DDOS-buster CloudFlare to intercept and redirect users. Little is yet known about the attacks, so far detected targeting piracy torrent site The Pirate Bay and a handful of other outfits. CloudFlare engineers have …

COMMENTS

Post your comment
House rules Send corrections
Add to 'My topics' unstar *
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    trollin

    And here I thought it would be a story about another third world sh1thole shutting down the internet to keep relatives from cheating on some mega lame be all end all test (they are 3rd world for a reason). I guess those already occurred in India this year.

    1 2 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: trollin

      If there's another riot, Theresa will be sure to use her internet shut-down powers, just in case you thought the UK wasn't a 3rd world sh1thole.

      7 2 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: trollin

        and that internet shutdown will be as much use as a chocolate teapot when people realise they have mouths and can communicate with speech. I don't think Theresa has thought it through, either that or there are more nefarious reasons for said powers.

        0 0 Reply
  2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Big Brother

    Oh yeah?

    The Indian Government may have reason to target CloudFlare customers.

    Governments always have reasons to target their citizens. Always.

    It already begins with the fact that there is a "national debt" (debtless unborn life? You wish!).

    1 0 Reply
  3. Alan J. Wylie

    "conducting infection of host headers"

    conducting infection of host headers

    Perhaps "conducting inspection"?

    2 0 Reply
  4. streaky

    95% chance it's directly related to..

    the idiotic block from 2014 where they blocked access to many sites (declaring an interest: including one of mine) because they were hosting "terrorist material" despite the sites involved a) not doing that and b) the Indian government making no attempt to contact the sites involved.

    India doesn't like user generated content and more-so doesn't like user generated content that's arguably legitimately critical of the Indian government.

    They went around accusing such terrorist organisations as Github of being, y'know, terrorists and that was that. Don't need to contact the sites explaining the issue or anything. If this isn't in the same vein I'll be amazed.

    P.S this sort of blocking never ever ever works.

    2 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who typed this article?

    Was it an 11 year old or was it a non-English speaking adult who then put it through Google translator?

    1 0 Reply
  6. cyberlawconsulting

    Nothing illegal

    Cloudflare is a CDN provider. Being a CDN provider they have servers located all over the world. Cloudflare also has servers hosted in airtel Data centre; hence any traffic from Cloudflare to the back end network they are trying to reach will pass through Airtel network; and hence be subject to the policies we lay down for blocking (approved as per Governments Department Of Telecommunication)

    In this case the certificate that is shown is cloudflare’s. However when Cloudflare attempts to make a connection to thepriatebay.org this is being done over HTTP. Hence Airtel is able to inspect the request and check if it is being made to a website that is part of the block list. Since thepiratebay.org is a part of the block list, airtel blocks this request and inserts the default blocking message (http://www.airtel.in/dot/)

    Hence given that Cloudflare servers are hosted on Airtel network and Airtel is mandated to block traffic to thepiratebay.org don’t see anything wrong / illegal that is being done.

    Good read, but incorrect facts with Gas

    0 0 Reply

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

Forgotten password ?

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like