A leak of more than 100,000 documents shows that a little-known Chinese company has been quietly selling censorship systems seemingly modeled on the Great Firewall to governments around the world.

Geedge Networks, a company founded in 2018 that counts the “father” of China’s massive censorship infrastructure as one of its investors, styles itself as a network-monitoring provider, offering business-grade cybersecurity tools to “gain comprehensive visibility and minimize security risks” for its customers, the documents show. In fact, researchers found that it has been operating a sophisticated system that allows users to monitor online information, block certain websites and VPN tools, and spy on specific individuals.

Researchers who reviewed the leaked material found that the company is able to package advanced surveillance capabilities into what amounts to a commercialized version of the Great Firewall—a wholesale solution with both hardware that can be installed in any telecom data center and software operated by local government officers. The documents also discuss desired functions that the company is working on, such as cyberattack-for-hire and geofencing certain users.

According to the leaked documents, Geedge has already entered operation in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar, as well as another unidentified country. A public job posting shows that Geedge is also looking for engineers who can travel to other countries for engineering work, including to several countries not named in the leaked documents, WIRED has found.

The files, including Jira and Confluence entries, source code, and correspondence with a Chinese academic institution, mostly involve internal technical documentation, operation logs, and communications to solve issues and add functionalities. Provided through an anonymous leak, the files were studied by a consortium of human rights and media organizations including Amnesty International, InterSecLab, Justice For Myanmar, Paper Trail Media, The Globe and Mail, the Tor Project, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, and Follow The Money.

“This is not like lawful interception that every country does, including Western democracies,” says Marla Rivera, a technical researcher at InterSecLab, a global digital forensics research institution. In addition to mass censorship, the system allows governments to target specific individuals based on their website activities, like having visited a certain domain.

The surveillance system that Geedge is selling “gives so much power to the government that really nobody should have,” Rivera says. “This is very frightening.”

Digital Authoritarianism as a Service

At the core of Geedge’s offering is a gateway tool called Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), designed to sit inside data centers and could be scaled to process the internet traffic of an entire country, documents reveal. According to researchers, every packet of internet traffic runs through it, where it can be scanned, filtered, or stopped outright. Besides monitoring the entire traffic, documents show that the system also allows setting up additional rules for specific users that it deems suspicious and collecting their network activities.

For unencrypted internet traffic, the system is able to intercept sensitive information such as website content, passwords, and email attachments, according to the leaked documents. If the content is properly encrypted through the Transport Layer Security protocol, the system uses deep packet inspection and machine learning techniques to extract metadata from the encrypted traffic and predict whether it’s going through a censorship circumvention tool like a VPN. If it can’t distinguish the content of the encrypted traffic, the system can also opt to flag it as suspicious and block it for a period of time.

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), in collaboration with Seikei University, has successfully enhanced the power output of lithium-air batteries, which are attracting attention as next-generation batteries. By developing a highly porous electrode made of carbon nanotubes, the team achieved a tenfold increase in output current. The lithium-air battery developed in this study not only has extremely high energy density compared to lithium-ion batteries but also significantly improved power performance.

As a result, it is now able to supply the power required for hovering small drones, making significant improvements in flight duration feasible. These results were published online in the Journal of Power Sources on February 9, 2025.

Lithium-air batteries (LABs) are rechargeable batteries that operate through discharge and charge reactions using lithium and oxygen. They are attracting attention as an energy storage technology capable of achieving significantly lighter weight and larger capacity than conventional lithium-ion batteries, with a potential energy density 5 to 10 times higher. However, lithium-air batteries have extremely slow reaction kinetics, resulting in only very weak output current. To make use of the large amount of energy stored in lithium-air batteries, a fundamental improvement in their power output has been required.

The research team developed a highly porous carbon nanotube air electrode that significantly improved oxygen accessibility. When combined with a low-viscosity amide-based electrolyte, the new design enabled a tenfold increase in current density. The resulting battery achieved a specific power density sufficient to support hovering in lightweight drones.

Based on these results, the team aims to scale up lithium-air battery cells, with the goal of developing ultra-lightweight and high-capacity batteries that can be used as power sources for small drones and microrobots.

Having spent the best part of a year and a half working to unify its products and tools with those of its new owners Cisco, Splunk is using its annual Splunk.conf event in Boston, Massachusetts, to showcase a number of future developments, beginning with the introduction of the new Cisco Data Fabric platform.

Following the closure of the multibillion dollar purchase in 2024, Splunk and Cisco moved quickly to start to integrate their technology offerings. By last September, as Computer Weekly reported at the time, the duo already had multiple tools, such as Splunk’s Observability Cloud, working well with Cisco AppDynamics, Talos Threat Intelligence and ThousandEyes, and were eyeing closer integration in other areas.

Speaking to reporters in advance of the show’s opening keynote on Monday 8 September, Splunk senior vice president and general manager for EMEA, Petra Jenner, reflected on a busy year and said there were a lot of positive aspects to the deal.

“While we still have our own identity we are working more closely together to achieve better customer experiences,” she said. “One of the key priorities for us is to ensure that customers are really supportive. They see that we are collaborating from a technical point of view.”

Jenner said that prior to Splunk’s acquisition by Cisco, while it had had a strong and growing presence in markets such as the UK, France and Germany, there had been a recognition that it needed to invest in growth.

Cisco’s money has been a catalyst for this investment, not only in the UK but also helping open up more business in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said Jenner.

“The impact the acquisition had for the Splunk EMEA team has been extremely good. We have joint customer engagements and there are core initiatives going on so that customers can really leverage the joint Splunk and Cisco, not only the product but also the overall convergence,” said Jenner.

“It also suits very well the technology trends [that are] happening,” she added. “In regard to AI the platform approach is getting more important.”

Jenner also reaffirmed Splunk’s commitment to its IT channel partners both in the security and observability fields, saying it has doubled the numbers on its books. She added that drawing on the strength of Cisco partners – with all the myriad possible networking certifications available – that may not have previously considered Splunk, may help make the platform concept an easier sell to customers looking to do more.