Communications of the ACM
China Internet Hijack: A Guide
Credit: Clarke Kendall / telegraph.co.uk
China Telecom, a state-owned business, has denied U.S. claims that it hijacked 15 percent of the world's Web traffic for a total of 18 minutes earlier this year. This included traffic to and from the websites of the U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps, the office of the U.S. defense secretary, the U.S. Senate and NASA, as well as more general Internet traffic. The United States has claimed that the diverted data might have allowed "a telecommunications firm to compromise the integrity of supposedly secure, encrypted sessions," though there is no evidence, thus far, that any information was harvested from the diverted traffic.
The diversion was supposedly triggered when China Telecom issued a false notification from its servers to Internet traffic on the Web that told the traffic that the quickest way to reach its destination was to re-route through China Telecom's servers.
The diversion, which affected predominantly U.S. web traffic, remained in place for 18 minutes. It is unclear how, or by whom, that instruction to divert was rescinded.
From The Telegraph
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