18-11-2010, 06:23 PM
China stole the Internet
In April of 2009, for 18 minutes about 15% of the worlds internet traffic was re-routed through Chinese servers.
China denies allegations that it hijacked net traffic, an allegation made by the US Congress.
A report on the matter was written by the US-China Economic and Security review commission where they stated that the re-routing of data was caused when China Telecom sent incorrect routing information which was then picked up by China Telecom, (a massive, state-owned ISP).
Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, the incident affected traffic to and from US government (‘‘.gov’’) and military (‘‘.mil’’) sites, Among traffic rerouted via China during the 18 minutes was that destined for the websites of the US Senate, Navy and Marine Corps, the Office of the Secretary of Defence, Nasa and the Commerce Department as well as general internet traffic. It is not clear whether the re-routing was intentional.
The culprit here was "IP hijacking," a well-known routing problem in a worldwide system based largely on trust. Routers rely on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to puzzle out the best route between two IP addresses; when one party advertises incorrect routing information, routers across the globe can be convinced to send traffic on geographically absurd paths.
It has been noticed that such actions have the capability to enable severe malicious activities.
Maybe on a related note, the recent Stuxnet malware, which appeared to target Iran's nuclear power plants, has caused alarm in governments around the world about a new wave of state-sponsored cyber-attacks. You can read our article here: http://mcompute.co.uk/showthread.php?tid=392
![[Image: china-stole-the-internet.png]](http://markwood.co.cc/donotdelete/articles/china-stole-the-internet.png)
In April of 2009, for 18 minutes about 15% of the worlds internet traffic was re-routed through Chinese servers.
China denies allegations that it hijacked net traffic, an allegation made by the US Congress.
A report on the matter was written by the US-China Economic and Security review commission where they stated that the re-routing of data was caused when China Telecom sent incorrect routing information which was then picked up by China Telecom, (a massive, state-owned ISP).
Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, the incident affected traffic to and from US government (‘‘.gov’’) and military (‘‘.mil’’) sites, Among traffic rerouted via China during the 18 minutes was that destined for the websites of the US Senate, Navy and Marine Corps, the Office of the Secretary of Defence, Nasa and the Commerce Department as well as general internet traffic. It is not clear whether the re-routing was intentional.
Quote:"The most likely cause of disruption to the internet comes from software failure associated with the transition to IPV6”
The culprit here was "IP hijacking," a well-known routing problem in a worldwide system based largely on trust. Routers rely on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to puzzle out the best route between two IP addresses; when one party advertises incorrect routing information, routers across the globe can be convinced to send traffic on geographically absurd paths.
It has been noticed that such actions have the capability to enable severe malicious activities.
Maybe on a related note, the recent Stuxnet malware, which appeared to target Iran's nuclear power plants, has caused alarm in governments around the world about a new wave of state-sponsored cyber-attacks. You can read our article here: http://mcompute.co.uk/showthread.php?tid=392
![[Image: nomnomnom.jpg]](http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/884/nomnomnom.jpg)