Chinese ISP Hijacks the Internet (Again)

CWmike writes "For the second time in two weeks, bad networking information spreading from China has disrupted the Internet. On Thursday morning, bad routing data from a small Chinese ISP called IDC China Telecommunication was re-transmitted by China's state-owned China Telecommunications, and then spread around the Internet, affecting Internet service providers such as AT&T, Level3, Deutsche Telekom, Qwest Communications, and Telefonica. 'There are a large number of ISPs who accepted these routes all over the world,' said Martin A. Brown, technical lead at Internet monitoring firm Renesys. Brown said the incident started just before 10 am Eastern and lasted about 20 minutes. During that time the Chinese ISP transmitted bad routing information for between 32,000 and 37,000 networks, redirecting them to IDC instead of their rightful owners. These networks included about 8,000 US networks, including those operated by Dell, CNN, Starbucks, and Apple. More than 8,500 Chinese networks, 1,100 in Australia, and 230 owned by France Telecom were also affected."

Comments

Re:Accident

[BrokenHalo]

Three times is enemy action.

I would agree, except that nobody gained anything from this action. I would surmise that this is another case of the Chinese fucking something up because they don't really know how it works.

However, there's a good argument for not accepting any routing information from China at all: if they don't want to play along with the rest of the world's rules, then they don't get to play with our toys. A kick in the pants of that sort of magnitude is long overdue, but it would require our governments and corporations growing some balls.

Re:cut'em loose

[Wakko Warner]

I'd mod you up if I could.

We need to just cut their fucking cables until they figure out how to use the goddamned Internet responsibly.