How China Swallowed 15 Percent of Internet Traffic for 18 Minutes
How China swallowed 15% of ‘Net traffic for 18 minutes

          
          
The China situation appears to have a similar cause. The mistaken routing information came from IDC China Telecommunications, and it was then picked up by the huge China Telecom. As other routers around the world accepted the new information, they began funneling huge amounts of US traffic through Chinese servers, for 18 minutes.
As with many things involving cyberattacks and Internet security, it's hard to know if anything bad happened here. The entire thing could have been a simple mistake. Besides, Internet traffic isn't secure and already passes through many servers outside of one's control. Content that is sensitive but still suitable for the public Internet should be encrypted. Still, the Commission points out the many possible problems that such an IP hijack could cause.

Although the Commission has no way to determine what, if anything, Chinese telecommunications firms did to the hijacked data, incidents of this nature could have a number of serious implications. This level of access could enable surveillance of specific users or sites. It could disrupt a data transaction and prevent a user from establishing a connection with a site. It could even allow a diversion of data to somewhere that the user did not intend (for example, to a ‘‘spoofed’’ site). Arbor Networks Chief Security Officer Danny McPherson has explained that the volume of affected data here could have been intended to conceal one targeted attack.

What about encryption?

 Perhaps most disconcertingly, as a result of the diffusion of Internet security certification authorities, control over diverted data could possibly allow a telecommunications firm to compromise the integrity of supposedly secure encrypted sessions. 

The proliferation of certification authorities means that "untrustworthy" certification authorities are much harder to police, and there's speculation now that governments are involved in getting access to certificates in order to break encryption.
China has openly sought all sorts of encryption information for years, including the source code for routers, network intrusion systems, and firewalls. Those rules went into effect in May 2010, and they require foreign firms to submit this information to Chinese authorities before the government will purchase any such products.
But because the government review panels contain employees of rival Chinese firms, and because providing this information could make a company's worldwide products more susceptible to Chinese hacking or cyberattacks (which would in turn kill sales of said products in most countries), the Commission notes that no foreign firm has yet submitted to the new scheme.


          
                  