Stefan Mileschin

US intelligence has been mimicking the search engine Google to conduct "man in the middle" surveillance of suspects.

Buried in among all the NSA leaks, which have shown direct economic and private espionage, was the news about an operation code-named Flying Pig.

According to Techdirt, Flying Pig has not been mentioned before, although there were rumours that the NSA and others had been using "man in the middle attacks".

The NSA was reportedly running the attacks against the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

The system is good as far as GCHQ and the NSA are concerned because they do not need to approach Google directly.

An NSA presentation that also contains some GCHQ slides describes how the attack was used to snoop on SSL traffic. It illustrates with a diagram how one of the agencies appears to have hacked into a target's internet router and covertly redirected targeted Google traffic using a fake security certificate. This allowed it to intercept the unencrypted information.

The British GCHQ network exploitation team developed Flying Pig because there was a rise in SSL encryption by email providers like Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail.

http://news.techeye.net/security/nsa...q-mimic-google