Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House

[Jesus Malverde]

Last edited Wed Jan 22, 2014, 05:56 PM - Edit history (1)

In one of the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, much of the Internet traffic in China was redirected to a small, 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Tuesday.

A large portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based technology company.

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s domain name system servers.

Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/chinese-internet-traffic-redirected-to-small-wyoming-house/?_php=true&_type=blogs&src=twr&_r=0

[Politicalboi]

1. Is The Dick back in Wyoming?

In an undisclosed location.

[okaawhatever]

2. I believe this house is a front for a lot of companies that want to use Wyoming's

anonymity laws. I ran across it while trying to find out info about a campaign donor. Wyoming is one of the few (maybe only one left) states that allows anonymity of owners of corporations. Florida doesn't require dollar info on corps so there is a house owned by an attorney who is the registered agent for hundreds, if not thousands, of shell corporations registered to this one house in Wyoming.

[okaawhatever]

4. Here's one story about the house. The attorney has since bought another house or two. it's an

older story, but very interesting. This is how a lot of dark money contributions are funneled.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628

from the article:

A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.

Wyoming Corporate Services will help clients create a company, and more: set up a bank account for it; add a lawyer as a corporate director to invoke attorney-client privilege; even appoint stand-in directors and officers as high as CEO. Among its offerings is a variety of shell known as a "shelf" company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity

[Jesus Malverde]

6. Beat me to it...

[Jesus Malverde]

5. Special Report: A little house of secrets on the Great Plains

The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming.

At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn't a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It's a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn, a few blocks from the State Capitol.

Neighbors say they see little activity there besides regular mail deliveries and a woman who steps outside for smoke breaks. Inside, however, the walls of the main room are covered floor to ceiling with numbered mailboxes labeled as corporate "suites." A bulky copy machine sits in the kitchen. In the living room, a woman in a headset answers calls and sorts bushels of mail.

A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.

Wyoming Corporate Services will help clients create a company, and more: set up a bank account for it; add a lawyer as a corporate director to invoke attorney-client privilege; even appoint stand-in directors and officers as high as CEO. Among its offerings is a variety of shell known as a "shelf" company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628

[okaawhatever]

7. I think there's much more to this than just an accident. Maybe trying to get the acct

numbers or secret info for all those companies. There's billions in assets. Also, remember they're the company accused of creating a shell corp for the jailed Ukranian leader. Too many coincidents here.....

[Jesus Malverde]

9. Maybe related to "China's Elite Wealth in Offshore Tax Havens, Leaked Files Show"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014705292

[okaawhatever]

11. I think you're onto something. I hope some of the dark money corporate and out of country

donors are "accidentally" revealed during all of this.

[Drew Richards]

3. I love how they can write paragraphs and say nothing...it was obvious to all of us that manage

The internet backbone...China accidentally or intentionally screwed up BGP PREFIX LisT AND DIRECTED ALL TRAFFIC TO THAT WYOMING NETWORK.

It was a fun shitstorm to watch.

[KoKo]

8. How could they know that address to send the traffic to, though?

It's a bizarre read. Especially since the house is known to hide shell companies set ups.

Why would two Chinese Internet services happen to know that address?

[Drew Richards]

13. The company is know for what is called dynamic IP/DNS it hides the ip to domain name

Of someone. They were probably blocking all of china from being able to use the service but forgot the ~. ANd put just a . On the end of AS path and instead of blocking it directed all default traffic to them...

Fun fun fun

Itss part of what is called AS PATH prepending...

[KoKo]

14. Thanks...!

[FarCenter]

18. And an IP address and the postal address of a front company are two entirely different things.

[Drew Richards]

21. Im sorry excuse me what are you trying to say? Or is this,just and water is wet?

[Drew Richards]

22. Here,in case you didnt bother to read the article or exerpt...

Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo. 

[FarCenter]

23. The article is BS -- the traffic is routed to wherever the IP addresses were advertised from

The IP addresses are being advertised by a router in some data center, probably somewhere in the US. That is where the packets were being sent to.

The physical location of the front company that provides mailing addresses and legal functions for shell corporations is irrelevant. The addresses are being used by a company that provides services to web sites that want to avoid being blocked by the Great Firewall of China. In particular, one of it customers is a Falun Gong web site.

[Drew Richards]

24. Nice word salad I know youre trying to make a point but damn if I can figure to agree or disagree

Since youre talking so much shit out of your ass about how BGP works.

Here let me clarify it for you...the mysterious house has ip addresses advertised via BGP on a gateway router to...Pac Bell which was the backbone they are on...these addresses are in a range China wished to put in what is call the bit bucket meaning any request via dns or ip to that ip range instead of going where it is supposed to...and where it is advertised from, they wanted all traffic to drop....

Instead they fucked up their BGP table on China's BGP overseas transport routers and redirected ALL TRAFFIC to that block of IP's in a sense creating one hell of a denial of service...on the mysterious houses gateway...not really just that one home but anything on that companies subnet...

They screwed it up so bad that even now BGP coming out of China is screwed up and most US backbone routers have China routes suspended, or as we all call it...dampened...this is going to last a few more days for all the dampened routes to time out and restore BGP reliability...

In the mean time China is still trying to rewrite their routing to block access to that block of ip's that you say falun gong have a site on...

Welcome to the internet controlled by censorship....

But no worries, the plan is stupid and defeatist...all they have to do is set up roaving anonymous ip redirectors in China that then hit other roaving redirectors and people will still off and on get access to falun gong or whatever...the end result is blocking everything or so much that internet in china for everyone including business would be worthless.

[FarCenter]

27. According to the article linked to by the OP ---

Those domain-name servers, which act like an Internet switchboard, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites to an Internet address that, according to records, is registered to Sophidea, a company based, at least on paper, in that Wyoming building, in Cheyenne. It is unclear where the company or its servers are physically based, however.

The traffic was diverted to the "unclear" location where "its servers are physically based", and not to the building in Cheyenne.

Until last year, Sophidea was based in a 1,700-square-foot brick house on a residential block of Cheyenne. The house, and its former tenant, a business called Wyoming Corporate Services, was the subject of a lengthy Reuters article in 2011 that found that about 2,000 business entities had been registered to the home. Among them were a company controlled by a jailed former Ukraine prime minister, the owner of a company charged with helping online poker operators evade online gambling bans, and one entity that was banned from government contract work after selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

Wyoming Corporate Services, which helps clients anywhere in the world create companies on paper and is designated to receive lawsuits on their behalf, moved its headquarters 10 blocks from its former base last year. Gerald Pitts, the Wyoming Corporate Services president, said in an interview on Wednesday that his company acted as the registered agent for 8,000 businesses, including Sophidea, though he did not know what the company did.

[Vashta Nerada]

10. Hopefully Anonymous will let us know what this house is.

[dreamnightwind]

12. Verrrryyy interesting...

[MADem]

15. SCMP and a bunch of other Chinese sites are HARD down right now...very odd.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/22/world/asia/china-internet-outage/

China suffers massive Internet outage, analysts suspect hackers

[hootinholler]

16. LOL

Hackers reply No, Incompetence!

[MADem]

17. Hey, I am "Shultzing" (Know nassink, seeeee nasssink!) on this issue--just passing on what I read.

Very weird to see SCMP hard down....that's a Hong Kong asset, not a mainland one (cough....ostensibly).

[FarCenter]

20. SCMP is up now

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1411022/china-internet-outage-could-have-affected-least-200-million-users

[FarCenter]

19. China blames Internet outage on hacking attack

Speculation is growing that hackers hijacked a root DNS (Domain Name System) server in China to reroute all user traffic, said GreatFire.org, a group that monitors China's Internet and opposes the nation's censorship.

But in a Wednesday posting, GreatFire.org dismissed such claims, noting that a public DNS server operated by Google had also been affected by the networking error. During the outage, users trying to access the Google DNS server from China were also rerouted to the IP address from Dynamic Internet Technology.

"Some are suggesting Dynamic Internet Technology is behind the outage. However, hacking into a root DNS resolver is not enough to cause this outage," the group said. "They have to hack into GFW (The Great Firewall)."

Instead, authorities may have tried to block DIT's IP address, but accidentally ended up rerouting all the nation's traffic to the address, the group added.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245626/China_blames_Internet_outage_on_hacking_attack?source=CTWNLE_nlt_pm_2014-01-22

[Eleanors38]

25. Nah, a pronghorn antelope whizzed on the house's breaker box.

[siligut]

26. The Chinese Internet censors basically shot themselves in the foot

By late Tuesday, some technologists surmised that the disruption might have been caused by Chinese Internet censors who tried to block traffic to Sophidea’s websites because they could be used to evade the Great Firewall and mistakenly redirected traffic to the Internet address.

That theory was buttressed by the fact that a separate wave of Chinese Internet traffic Tuesday was simultaneously redirected to Internet addresses owned by Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that helps people evade China’s Great Firewall, and is typically blocked in China.

According to D.I.T.’s website, its clients include Epoch Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Falun Gong movement; Voice of America; Radio Free Asia; and Human Rights in China, an activist group based in New York.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/big-web-crash-in-china-experts-suspect-great-firewall/

Oh, the irony . . .

[L0oniX]

28. Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company = NSA outpost