The Internet Kill Switch; With Global Wiretapping Capability?

One company to rule them all

One company to find them;

One company to bring them all

And in the darkness bind them

Recently run any whois queries on Google? No? How about Facebook? MSN, or

Hotmail? Yahoo? You might be surprised, comparing the results.

Nice, innit? See the "Last Updated" part also.

The brand-protecting, anti-piracy company MarkMonitor Inc. has had all these

DNS names under its control for several months now.

They also control the Wikimedia name services, even though that doesn't show

up on the Wikimedia.org whois record. There are many others. Apple.com falls

under their jurisdiction, as does ubuntu.com. Nokia.com? Yep, under

MarkMonitor. See a pattern here?

MarkMonitor also is a trusted Certificate Authority; they have, in essence,

the means to fabricate safe-looking SSL connections for you, to whichever host

they want. Your browser will not sound any warnings of possible

man-in-the-middle attacks.

MarkMonitor is a company that can own most people's "Internet" in minutes. It

now controls all three top free e-mail providers directly, and I suppose it's

safe to say, most currently active social media sites too.

See for yourself. Whois yahoo.com, whois google.com, whois gmail.com, whois

facebook.com, whois fbcdn.com, whois hotmail.com, whois msn.com... the list

seems endless.

How'd all this happen?

This company has acquired complete access to monitor, eavesdrop, censor and

fake any user of these popular Internet services in about one year (2011). In

almost complete silence. For several of the sites, it also provides "firewall

proxy" services, which means it is actually paid to intercept all

communications. In and out.

The situation reminds me of Joseph Lieberman's 2010 initiative to create an

"Internet kill switch" for the U.S.

The government only needs to control this one company, and most social media,

most free e-mail, most search engines will be under its control. Not to mention

most operating systems, for both computers and mobile devices.

Not only inside U.S., but globally. One company to rule them all.

I, for one, would like to ask; WTF is going on? How did these guys, this

relatively small domain-hogging and pirate-chasing company, get the resources

to simply acquire the DNS records of all the most popular Internet services?

How can this be so totally ignored by the media, and even privacy advocates?

Even conspiracy theorists seem to be completely ignoring the situation.

Secure communication is an illusion

Only one company to rule them all? As if all this doesn't sound bad enough,

the problem is far more widespread. MarkMonitor could easily act as a global

"kill switch" for the sites under its rule. But as it turns out, most anyone

with some resources could just as easily impersonate MarkMonitor itself.

Because, as one might have noticed in the past few months, the whole SSL

certificate scheme is broken. Not in a technical sense - there's no known

inherent weakness in the algorithms. But the whole SSL protection is based on

trust, and that trust has failed us.

According to several sources, SSL CA certs are routinely given out to anyone

willing to pay for them. As The Register points out in its analysis on

TrustWave spying scandal:

"Those defending Trustwave suggested that other vendors probably used the same

approach for so-called "data loss prevention" environments - systems that

inspect information flowing through a network to prevent leaks of commercially

sensitive data."

...

"In fact Geotrust was openly advertising a 'Georoot' product on their website

until fairly recently."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/14/trustwave_analysis/

Oh, so the ability to impersonate anyone is normal day-to-day practise for big

business? Just imagine what government agencies must be doing - for example in

Sweden, where the military intelligence organisation FRA has the mandate to

monitor all traffic across borders.

Who can seriously claim they trust all the hundreds of different CA companies,

several of which have been caught red-handed with selling out their customers'

security, or covering up very serious breeches (up to and including their root

certificates being stolen).

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/04/06/eff-uncovers-further-evidence-of-ssl-ca-bad-behavior/

MarkMonitor is a "brand-protecting" company. Traditionally its business has

been reserving domains to protect brands. You buy its service, it makes sure

that nobody else can have "mybrandsucks.com".

Also, they're an anti-piracy outfit. Their entire business is based on

protecting IP.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/markmonitor-to-exhibit-at-internet-tech-policy-exhibition-and-reception-to-be-held-on-capitol-hill-2012-01-24

Just saying, someone should probably question them and their customers. Why

does Google, who always "do things themselves", externalise these vital parts

of its network? How come all the competing phone and OS vendors, who sue each

other all the time, suddenly trust this one company?

And then there's all those competing social media companies, who practically

thrive on what others call "IP theft", including their users sharing text,

images, music, videos and links?