Error Sends Facebook Traffic Between AT&T To China Telecom

Yesterday Internet data between AT&T and their customers was temporarily directed through China Telecom hardware before reaching the destination. Alarmed by the situation, security researcher Barrett Lyon notified The Register UK.

There isn’t any information about whether sensitive information was taken from the hardware, but Lyon said that it is likely that Chinese authorities may have been looking at unencrypted traffic from Facebook servers on China Telecom’s networks. Facebook issued the following statement:

We are investigating a situation today that resulted in a small amount of a single carrier’s traffic to Facebook being misdirected. We are working with the carrier to determine the cause of this error.

Our initial checks of the latency of the requests indicate that no traffic passed through China.

If you are worried about security on Facebook, remember to allow encryption in your settings. To enable encryption on Facebook, go to your Account Settings page. Select Account Security and check the box that says “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible.”

[TNW]