Re:Juniper breach mystery starts to clear with new details o...
by Zigurd on Monday September 06, 2021 @09:12AM
(#28433318)
There is an interesting aspect of the room 641a story that could turn out to be different in detail:
The Wikipedia article says, as do other accounts, that beam splitters were used to tap into fiber optic lines. That might in fact be how it was done, but I do not think that was necessary.
IIRC, Juniper core routers were (uniquely, at the time?) capable of duplicating traffic on a NIC to another NIC without performance impact on capacity as a whole. This would have made them particularly suitable for mass surveillance that would not show up in network management metrics.
The Wikipedia article says, as do other accounts, that beam splitters were used to tap into fiber optic lines. That might in fact be how it was done, but I do not think that was necessary.
IIRC, Juniper core routers were (uniquely, at the time?) capable of duplicating traffic on a NIC to another NIC without performance impact on capacity as a whole. This would have made them particularly suitable for mass surveillance that would not show up in network management metrics.