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A comment on “What Is That Box?” – When The NSA Shows Up At Your Internet Company. Parent comment

Re:“What Is That Box?” – When The NSA Shows Up At Your Inter... by Sanddancer on Saturday July 20, 2013 @03:20AM (#6074558)
No. Its entire job is logging. Doing MITMs could very potentially lead to information leaking that shows surveillance is going on. Pretty much any switch a datacenter's going to use has port mirroring, which allows for a passive, invisible tap of a server.
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Re:“What Is That Box?” – When The NSA Shows Up At Your Inter... by justincormack on Saturday July 20, 2013 @04:28AM (#6074663)
I do wonder if the NSA insists this functionality is there...
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Re:“What Is That Box?” – When The NSA Shows Up At Your Inter... by griffordson on Saturday July 20, 2013 @07:08AM (#6074897)
This was probably the FBI. And if the data center's switch couldn't mirror the customer port (I can't imagine any data center would use a switch that couldn't - but it is within the realm of possibility), the investigating agency would probably provide a 1U switch along with the 2U server that could handle the mirroring and then they could force the data center to connect the customer through that switch instead.
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Re:“What Is That Box?” – When The NSA Shows Up At Your Inter... by Sanddancer on Saturday July 20, 2013 @07:07AM (#6074896)
Just an unfortunate side effect. There are lots of legitimate uses for port mirroring in troubleshooting and monitoring a network, like intrusion detection and performance monitoring.
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