In an unprecedented move, China’s notorious censorship apparatus has begun to effectively block access to HSBC’s online corporate banking portal, affecting countless businesses in the world’s second largest economy.
Anti-censorship body Greatfire.org revealed the news in a blog post, including a cached online notice from HSBCnet to its customers acknowledging the service was “currently experiencing problems.”
Said notice has now been removed, possibly at the request of the authorities.
Greatfire’s Charlie Smith suggested that the disruption to corporate customers of the world’s second largest bank is a result of the censors trying to block access to Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider Akamai, which it uses as part of the secure log-in system for clients.
HSBC uses an Akamai subdomain, https://a248.e.akamai.net, which is also used by Greatfire.org to host its mirror sites. China is currently trying to take down these sites because they provide users inside the Great Firewall with a means to view blocked content such as Reuters Chinese and the Chinese Wall Street Journal.
However, as the Akamai subdomain is used for encrypted sites, the Great Firewall cannot distinguish between Greatfire’s mirror sites and those used by other customers like HSBC, resulting in the disruption.
Smith told Infosecurity that other corporate users of the same subdomain are also likely to have had their online services disrupted.
“I think that they are affected in the same way HSBC is affected. The HSBC site itself is not blocked, but when consumers try to log in, then the site calls on services hosted with Akamai, and then you cannot log in,” he explained.
“It's not immediately obvious. I think some sites may have broken images and videos, or some other elements could be missing.”
The news follows hot-on-the-heels of Beijing’s astonishing move to completely block Verizon EdgeCast, one of the world’s largest CDNs, via a DNS poisoning attack.
It’s thought as many as tens of thousands of sites could be affected as a result, again, of the authorities' desire to stamp out Greatfire’s troublesome mirror sites.
It remains to be seen whether the Communist Party will scale back its operations, given that they could mark the regime out as hostile to business and foreign investment.
“Chinese and foreign executives should raise these issues with the authorities. Given the nature and construction of the global internet, human rights and activist websites cannot be isolated from financial and corporate ones,” Smith argued in the blog post.
“It is impossible for the authorities to deny that we are now truly living in a globally connected world. Corporate executives, if they wish to make further investments in China and overseas, should raise this matter with the authorities immediately, as it is likely that similar disruptions to online financial institutions are going to occur in the future.”
In an irony not lost on anti-censorship activists, China today kicked off its inaugural World Internet Conference in Wuzhen.
This largely all-Chinese affair appears to be little more than a PR exercise masquerading as an attempt to portray the country as a key player in the global internet governance debate.
As with other big name “international” conferences held inside the Great Firewall, it seems that Beijing has graciously decided to allow virtually unfettered access to the internet, but just in the one location, and only for the duration of the event.