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For 18 Minutes, 15% of the Internet Routed Through China

olsmeister writes "For 18 minutes this past April, 15% of the world's internet traffic was routed through servers in China. This includes traffic from both .gov and .mil US TLDs." The crazy thing is that this happened months ago, and nobody noticed. Hope you're encrypting your super-secret stuff.

6 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Nobody Noticed ... Except Everyone (Even Slashdot) by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative

    The crazy thing is that this happened months ago, and nobody noticed.

    Odd, Slashdot reported the day afterward: Chinese ISP Hijacks the Internet (Again).

    --
    My work here is dung.
  2. Re:Nobody Noticed ... Except Everyone (Even Slashd by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Informative

    That summary and article didn't report the .mil or .gov traffic.

    I guess we just assumed it was only youtube videos or pokes on facebook.

  3. Re:Nobody Noticed ... Except Everyone (Even Slashd by Sepodati · · Score: 4, Informative

    They hijacked prefixes, not data. At least not directly. If you sent a packet during that time, it may have been routed to China. I doubt they stood up a big infrastructure to close TCP sessions with all of that incoming traffic and actually capture anything. Perhaps for a very targetted attack they could have, but then there'd be better ways than this to do it, I imagine.

  4. And for documentation about the NSA closets by thesandbender · · Score: 4, Informative
  5. Re:Nobody Noticed ... Except Everyone (Even Slashd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sorry to be AC.

    as an IP engineer at a major backbone provider, I can safely comment on the hyperbole of this incident.

    China Telcom -4134- would have to either send very/more specific routes and get max prefixes blown out, or send very general routes and loose to smaller routes.

    yes, for a little while any "tier 1" player, or major government player, can convince another provider to send routes to an inappropriate AS, the game soon ends. anyone who isn't running at the very least a max prefix is a cluetard and needs their peering revoked anyway. From my 20%, 4134 is always a hair's breath away from getting a smackdown.

    tldr; they can't really steal the whole internet, but we need to watch out for smaller route hyjacking.

  6. Re:Stop the trolling by madprof · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since when has a low UID meant anything? Or, indeed, positive karma?
    They're trolling, pure and simple. And quite well given you took the bait!