Airtel has been capitalising, sniffing and intercepting ALL unencrypted traffic in sites tended by DDOS-buster CloudFlare.
CloudFlare engineers had an emergency meeting to investigate into the matter. They have verified claims that traffic to their customer sites is being intercepted.
When you try to visit to the intercepted websites then you are redirected to an Airtel page which reads that the "requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India".
Some of the CloudFlare's websites which are redirected include those run by political dissidents, hacking forums, and piracy sites.
According to the India-based developer Abhay Rana (@captn3m0) and security researcher Shantanu Goel (@shantanugoel) Pirate Bay traffic interception which they suspected might be because of the cooperation between CloudFlare and the Indian Government.
CloudFlare founder Matthew Prince told The Register that, "The company concluded a meeting less than an hour ago and says there are no security flaws on its side, but that the company was blind-sided by the interception."
.
Prince says that the attacks occurred at their Chennai and New Delhi data centres but not at their Mumbai centre.
"It appears to only affect traffic that is being passed over an unencrypted link," Prince says.
"Whatever the system is that is looking for the requests might not be installed in Mumbai, we don't know, but it appears to be triggered off the host header in requests.
"It suggests there is some system that is running either at the edge of India's network or within AirTel that is at least conducting infection of host headers in requests."
Prince says the company is examining "all traffic" to locate other affected customer sites, but did not name impacted clients.
CloudFlare contacted AirTel representatives and they were not aware of the interception.
In May, CloudFlare asked their customers to install its free certificate.
CloudFlare engineers had an emergency meeting to investigate into the matter. They have verified claims that traffic to their customer sites is being intercepted.
When you try to visit to the intercepted websites then you are redirected to an Airtel page which reads that the "requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India".
Some of the CloudFlare's websites which are redirected include those run by political dissidents, hacking forums, and piracy sites.
According to the India-based developer Abhay Rana (@captn3m0) and security researcher Shantanu Goel (@shantanugoel) Pirate Bay traffic interception which they suspected might be because of the cooperation between CloudFlare and the Indian Government.
CloudFlare founder Matthew Prince told The Register that, "The company concluded a meeting less than an hour ago and says there are no security flaws on its side, but that the company was blind-sided by the interception."
.
Prince says that the attacks occurred at their Chennai and New Delhi data centres but not at their Mumbai centre.
"It appears to only affect traffic that is being passed over an unencrypted link," Prince says.
"Whatever the system is that is looking for the requests might not be installed in Mumbai, we don't know, but it appears to be triggered off the host header in requests.
"It suggests there is some system that is running either at the edge of India's network or within AirTel that is at least conducting infection of host headers in requests."
Prince says the company is examining "all traffic" to locate other affected customer sites, but did not name impacted clients.
CloudFlare contacted AirTel representatives and they were not aware of the interception.
In May, CloudFlare asked their customers to install its free certificate.