Report: China's Geedge Networks supplies censorship systems to countries

The Chinese company Geedge Networks, which specializes in internet censorship and network monitoring, is said to have sold its systems to other countries. This is the result of an analysis of thousands of leaked documents, which several media and organizations worked on for a year. The leak reportedly included over 100,000 internal company documents, including Confluence data and JSON files. Various media outlets and organizations, including Wired, Der Standard and Amnesty International, worked together for a year to process this data. Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Myanmar and another unidentified country are among the technology company's customers.

Geedge bills itself as a provider of network monitoring services and offers its customers cybersecurity tools for companies to "gain comprehensive visibility and minimize security risks," according to documents obtained by Wired. Researchers found that Geedge's software can block websites and virtual private network (VPN) connections, spy on individual users and inject malware into systems.

Complete monitoring

A central component of the company is a gateway tool called Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), which monitors all data traffic. According to researchers, every packet of Internet traffic passes through TSG, where it can be scanned, filtered or stopped directly. TSG is designed for use in data centres. It can be scaled to handle the internet traffic of an entire country, according to internal documents obtained by Wired.

Geedge Networks is said to already be working on functions such as large-scale cyberattacks and geofencing of specific users. This would allow governments to block foreign websites, for example, which could only be accessed via detours.

"This is not comparable to the lawful surveillance that every country, including Western democracies, carries out," says Marla Rivera, technical researcher at InterSecLab, a global research institution for digital forensics. The surveillance system Geedge is selling "gives the government so much power that nobody should have," Rivera says. "That's very scary."

Potential expansion plans

On a Chinese platform, Geedge Networks is looking for a senior engineer for operations and maintenance abroad, writes Wired. This person must be willing to leave the country for several months to travel to Pakistan, Malaysia, Bahrain, Algeria, and India. Separately, according to Wired, they are looking for translators who speak Spanish and French and can promote business abroad.

(mma)