The British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been monitoring every public server in 27 countries for several years to find weaknesses in the systems. Some have described it as a hack on a gigantic scale.
The agency's so-called "Hacienda" program, revealed by German publication Heise, began in 2009 when GCHQ decided to apply the standard port scanning tool against entire nations.
The documents published by Heise show GCHQ having ports in 27 countries – meaning it “randomly scans every IP identified for one of those countries” – and partially scans five other nations. The 32 country names have been redacted from the report.
Port scanning has been used by attackers since the early days of TCP, exploiting a flaw in the coupling between TCP clients and servers that means the server leaks information without checking the client's permission.
