NSA Broke Into Links Between Google, Yahoo Datacenters

barlevg writes: The Washington Post reports that, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden, through their so-called "MUSCULAR" initiative, the National Security Agency has exploited a weakness in the transfers between data centers, which Google and others pay a premium to send over secure fiber optic cables. The leaked documents include a post-it note as part of an internal NSA Powerpoint presentation showing a diagram of Google network traffic, an arrow pointing to the Google front-end server with text reading, "SSL Added and Removed Here" with a smiley face. When shown the sketch by The Post and asked for comment, two engineers with close ties to Google responded with strings of profanity.

Interpreting the smiley face

[barlevg]

Submitter here. I've read over this article twice now, and I'm still confused as to the meaning of that post-it note. The post-it implies they attacked the interface between the "public internet" and the Google Cloud by somehow intercepting and decryption SSL traffic. On the other hand, the rest of the article states they targeted the links between the data centers (maybe by splicing into the fiber optic cables themselves?), so no decryption was needed, since all the information was in "clear text." Perhaps

Cool infographic, but no new information

[barlevg]

The link may say have read "How The Infiltration Worked" [washingtonpost.com] but it's just a fancier version of the post-it note without anything pointing to the point-of-attack. Still, an editor might want to include it.