News

The censorship authorities in China have blocked access to HSBC’s corporate banking portal, HSBCnet, casting a large shadow over the the ability for both foreign and domestic companies to conduct day-to-day business inside the country.

What happened?

On October 23, 2014 users started to report that they had trouble accessing the online corporate banking service at global behemoth HSBC.

HSBC's corporate portal HSBCnet apparently blocked in China cc @GreatFireChina http://t.co/80WvVpeKpG pic.twitter.com/uEnTBwCU7n

— Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) October 22, 2014

The bank itself was forced to add a note on its website acknowledging a problem:

Important Message: Customers logging in from China

Dear HSBCnet User

Please be advised that HSBCnet Users are currently experiencing problems when attempting to log into the system from within China. We are aware of this issue and are diligently working with local providers to deliver a prompt resolution.

This challenge resides outside the HSBCnet system and activity performed through our online banking platform remains secure.

The Chinese censorship authorities have DNS poisoned *edgecastcdn.net, which means all subdomains of edgecastcdn.net are blocked in China. EdgeCast is one of the largest Content Delivery Networks (CDN) in the world and provides its cloud services to thousands of websites and apps in China.

We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using “collateral freedom” 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. However, we can now reveal publicly that the authorities are doing just that - attempting to cut China off from the global internet.

We have seen instances of “collateral damage” due to “collateral freedom” over the past few days and have received emails from some smaller website owners wondering why their non-sensitive sites are being blocked by the great firewall.

What's going on?

The disruption to EdgeCast’s service was noted by the company on their website on November 14, 2014, although we noticed a problem on November 12 and the first poisoning on the 13th. The company's status update still appears on their site:

Please be advised, we are experiencing issues with content delivery in the China region due to suddenly increased restrictions imposed by the Chinese Government. If you are receiving reports from end users not able to view content from within China, please contact our network Operations center to discuss the options available to you.

Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple continue to trust CNNIC, putting user data at risk everywhere.

This is clearly a malicious attack on Apple in an effort 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. While the attacks on Google and Yahoo enabled the authorities to snoop on what information Chinese were accessing on those two platforms, the Apple attack is different. If users ignored the security warning and clicked through to the Apple site and entered their username and password, this information has now been compromised by the Chinese authorities. Many Apple customers use iCloud to store their personal information, including iMessages, photos and contacts. This may also somehow be related again to images and videos of the Hong Kong protests being shared on the mainland.

We also know that journalists are under enormous amounts of stress and we respect the fact that both WSJ and Reuters have reporters on the ground, putting themselves in danger to report this story. But why make such an effort if the fruits of that labor become evident more than 24 hours after the event for the audience that deserves to hear this story the most?

Reuters Chinese and WSJ Chinese are not reporting anything related to the Hong Kong protests while Reuters U.S. and WSJ U.S. both feature the protest as headline items.

As the authorities place even greater restrictions on foreign internet properties who wish to operate in China, they are giving these companies little room to manoeuvre and pushing them to adopt alternative approaches.

While the authorities have been blocking access to most things Google since June 4th, they have kept their hands off of CERNET, China’s nationwide education and research network. However, in the lead up to the new school year, the Chinese authorities have launched a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack against Google.

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