What an amazing thread ! Never seen anything like this before.
I wouldn't think any criminal lot would get involved with anything like what's being suggested here - you'd need a heist like breaking into the Bank of England to make it worthwhile.
The only people remotely with the capacity to do this sort of stuff are the security services.
This has been more fun than watching reruns of Star Trek

Yes, it's a laugh, isn't it?

It would seem to be the case of someone willing the entire world to fit into his so-called field of expertise, namely in this case security of his identity and activities.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Mon 25-Feb-13 23:15:15)

What you say is true, the effort and expertise required to wire tap etc etc would only be worth putting in for a very large enterprise worth millions. A small to medium business, even a large business, this is not worth the effort - and there are less expensive (expensive as in time, effort etc) ways of hacking in even then.

Last night I was the victim of a Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack by what appears to be the UK Government.

I first noticed that Netflix was acting strange, like when your Sky satellite box is having signal problems. After I finished watching my program on Netflix I was having difficulty loading web pages and found that internet was incredibly slow, even though I have an 80Mbps\20Mbps connection.

whatsmyip.org revealed that I was using a 'UK Government Department for Works and Pensions' IP address, 51.96.x.x

I work for an Internet Service Provider and was in the process of performing out of hours maintenance when I discovered my connection was being hijacked. Is this legal?

In reply to a post by clyde123:

What an amazing thread ! ... This has been more fun than watching reruns of Star Trek

We used to have discussions like this on TBB before we filled the forum with speculation on when fibre would reach our cabinets, if we are getting cabinets at all etc.

I am considering a scenario in which a leading computer security company supplying millions of users becomes compromised in some way. Even vast companies in (let's say) the oil industry, in (let's say) Russia have been leant upon.

Couldn't happen, could it?