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US government traffic was routed through China
ON APRIL 8 all US military and government traffic was routed through Chinese servers.
For 18 minutes, 15 per cent of the US Internet was under the direct control of the Chinese, a US Congress committee has been told.
Apparently a Chinese state-owned telecommunications firm, China Telecom rerouted traffic from websites of the US Senate and the Department of Defense, along with "many others" including NASA and the Department of Commerce.
According to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission's annual report, more than 15 per cent of the US Internet was routed through Chinese servers during this brief period.
The US military is uncertain if it was intentional and sanctioned by Beijing. Apparently it was started by a Chinese ISP, IDC China Telecommunications, before being taken on by China Telecom.
If the hack was planned, then the Chinese could have been backing up 18 minutes of traffic to decode and read at their leisure.
The committee was also concerned that Chinese would also have the IP addresses of everybody that communicated during that period and could tailor malware to plant more snooping viruses.
Commission vice chair Carolyn Bartholomew said that there must be some level of state support for these activities.
According to AFP, the commission on Wednesday recommended Congress call on the administration of President Barack Obama to formally investigate the "volume and seriousness of exploitations and attacks" targeting federal agencies that handle sensitive military and diplomatic information. µ
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The risk of using the Internet for everything is clearer every day. People talk about putting control of the power grid on the net though power companies have right of way everywhere. All sorts of serious government, military, IT, financial transactions, and other serious communications just use the general Internet.
The general Internet will likely be run by and for media companies, phone services, and the like though they didn't build it. I believe there is still enough dark fiber in the ground to build up a lot of new infrastructure at modest expense. The sooner serious uses are off the Net, the better.
Another though occurs - programmers on Wall Street are always looking to understand the fractal behavior of the market to be able to nudge it just a bit and make a fortune. Fortunes have been and are being spent on that particular dream. The Internet is also a huge, complex, and growing system with definitely unappreciated fractal behaviors waiting to emerge.
It's possible that samplings of real and important traffic plus a lot of simulation will uncover this behavior in advance. China has beaten the USA, well George Bush, in the economic wars now close to the endgame. To be fair they could hardly have forecast Bush's and the USA's suicidal behavior. In any case they may be trying to leapfrog Internet technology as a weapon and may or may not succeed.
ps - Recall that the government there is also a Windows source licensee as part of an agreement to let Microsoft do business in China. Gates went to China himself for that one.
Sound to me this is testing the water. China had already started standing up against US in many issue, and to be the king of the world, you need to have the best infrastructure, 18 minutes of huge traffic and China networks did not crash, could be a beginning of something.
On the other hand, could this be something related to the government backed search engine?
This was suppose to be fixed and not possible anymore after pakistan pulled a stunt like that wasn't it?
Good job on that one USA.
Internet routing is handled mainly by the protocol BGP (border gateway protocol) in which case each site is given a routing number (AS) which is associated with an IP network or networks. There are numerous metrics that can be applied to indicate which 'path' to a particular network is 'better' than another (i.e. you can have say 2 paths or 200 paths to the same network but only one would be 'best' at any one time based on the metrics you can apply).
All this really sounds like is that someone in china advertised the networks with a better path so the BGP tables were updated and sent the traffic to their location. Normally there is a prefix list that upstream providers put on to prevent someone just pulling routes but that doesn't always happen and if it is the provider itself that is screwing up the route it's moot (remember the UUnet routing screwup 12 years ago or so?)
Anyway, this can easily happen, I'm more amazed that the idiots in government are surprised by this. This is all PUBLIC networks so if you have any information on it that you do not want anyone to see encrypt it or use a PRIVATE network.
Could someone who understands the Internet please tell us how the Chinese could have done this? I was under the vague impression that traffic was "pushed" to servers rather than "pulled" by them.
The Chinese can re-rout 15% of US traffic at will.
And BT cant get round a small fire in Glasgow.
I want to be upgraded to the 3rd world please.