According to an Italian newsmagazine, a non-for-public eyes investigation of the Italian Data Protection Act would have found severe security problems in the management of the Internet Exchange Points (the points of the Italian telecommunication network where the various telco networks are mutually interconnected.)
A first remark is that the King is – or might be – naked. If this secret report actually exists (and the IDPA didn’t deny its existence) and has been leaked, the Authority’s information security is not that good, and – therefore – the IDPA should fine itself for this non compliance, instead of just targeting the rest of the (industrial) world.
Coming to the heart of the matter, in the words of the journalists that authored the article:
there is an enormous black hole in the security of the Italian telecommunications. A hole so wide that allows whoever with a proper equipment to have available phone calls, SMS, emails, chat, and social-network posted contents.
The journalists claim that the report verbatim says:
These device are equipped by technical features that can allow the traffic duplication, in real time, of the traffic in transit diverting it to another port (port mirroring)
and that
if somebody wanted to look at the traffic in transit this would be easily done with specific analysis tools …
It is amazing how this article – and the IDPA findings, if proven true – are so poorly legally and technically savvy because:
- the possibility of performing a port mirroring is necessary to the public prosecution and intelligence agency activities. The point, then, is how and by who these feature are exploited rather than its mere existence, that like-it-or-not are necessary for investigative purposes. One day, maybe, it will be possible to disclose some of the ways traffic data information are asked, but this is another story…
- there is no evidence of the port mirroring features being abused, misused or cracked,
- performing a port mirroring in an Internet Exchange Point is not as easy as the article and the IDPA report(?) says: it is not like Independence Day computer virus uploading or Swordfish’s Hugh Jackman “under pressure” hack,
- there is an easy way, available almost since day one of the pre-internet era to protect users’ communications without caring of what the ISPs do: client-based encryption. But I assume that the Minster of home affair wouldn’t like an IDPA endorsement of the “crypto-for-the-masses” slogan,
- oddly enough, the IDPA secret report (if true) doesn’t address the serious problem of network devices proprietary firmware and operating systems that prevent an ISP to check on its own the existence of backdoors (as in the recent Cisco affair) and other security flaws.
