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Claims About China's April Internet Hijack Are Overblown
sturgeon writes "Yesterday, we discussed what most of the world's major media outlets were reporting on China's April 2010 hijack of '15% of Internet traffic,' including sensitive US government and defense sites. The alarm came following a US Government report (see page 244) on China / US economic and security relations released on Tuesday. Unfortunately, few bothered with fact checking or actually reading the report. The actual study never makes any estimate of Internet traffic diverted during the hijack — it only cites a blog post to suggest large volumes of traffic were involved. And curiously, the cited blog at the heart of the report never mentions traffic at all — only routes. You have to go to an interview with a third-party security researcher in a minor trade magazine to first come up with the 15% number (and this article never explains where the number came from). In a review of real data and actual facts, Arbor Nework's Craig Labovitz has a blog post looking at the traffic volumes involved in the incident (only a couple of Gigabits per second, or a 'statistically insignificant' percentage of Internet traffic)."
Who'd a thunk it?
That there are fewer and fewer journalist. Now there are only people posting thoughtless articles with little merit in order to entertain and draw traffic/viewers to a web site or channel.
[J]
THe 15% number was just an eye grabber. The point is if a foreign government can redirect even a few messages that it chooses it is not good. Simply doing traffic analysis on the state department will alert people to crises. (they already do that with pizza deliveries to the whitehouse). I'd like to hear more abouthow it's done. is it some sort of DNS poisoning or publishing misleading ford-bellman shortest path info or rARP spoofing?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What?!!! A Slashdot summary was wrong? A sensationalist headline was wrong? No one did any fact checking?!!!! Inconceivable!
This is why Slashdot (News for Nerds) is "news" like Fox News is "news" - it's not. There's no journalistic ethics applied. It's entertainment and maybe occasionally informational.
Open TCP connections would die when the prefixes were blackholed anyway, and new ones wouldn't establish. It is likely that very little data would actually be exposed, and would mostly come from push-type feeds which use UDP or some other type of data that never needs to be acknowledged. I agree this sounds extremely overblown. This just sounds like another unintentional BGP hijack, not some well-orchestrated event where data was captured. Not to mention that the barriers to using BGP to proxy traffic are much higher than simply blackholing with BGP
http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2010-November/027839.html describes it
... welcome our new chinese overlords
As with most reports, there's often more to it than is reported and often less. I don't think this gets China "off the hook," though. I'm not a fan of our open relations with China going back years. It's one of the inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy that irks me. OTOH, I'm not one who thinks "live and let live" extends to governments who have serious human rights concerns. But I digress.
I would be surprised that the government was letting sensitive data from military branches route out unencrypted. Let me quantify. Do I think that it's incompetent enough to let data get rerouted? Yes. But the report cites the major military branches. This makes me wonder if there isn't some propaganda at work. It could have been information but it could have been misinformation. Lay the dollar on the table and you find out how honest your friends are while you're in the bathroom.
Maybe one of the new regulations that they mandate should be BGP route origin validation and proper response (filtering the announcement of the specific route in preference of a route with a valid origin bit)?
And 21.36% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
A wise man once said, "Where is my other quotation mark?
You don't know how many times I have read that all spams are coming from China when they in fact come from USA. I've heard countless times French right wingers saying that France cannot compete with China because of their small work taxes, when in fact taxes in China are sometimes higher than in France. This is just an example. Here, we have more than 30% of the WORLD TRAFFIC that is hijacked by USA absolutely 100% of the time, and with NSA doing deep packet inspection (and not even hiding to do so). Medias in USA should look at their own gov. with suspicion rather than saying bullshit about others without checking!
What other total BS stories are out there that we have readily accepted as the truth?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The post that was referred to sounded alarmist in the first place so I doubt most people gave it too much thought.
2. FUD
3. ???
4. Profit!
PS: Media includes sites such as /.
It sells newspapers though - and let's face it, journalists are in the business of 'selling newspapers' of some kind or another. If they are blatantly wrong then they can print another sensationalist story later on about how they were hoodwinked in an effort to get mileage out of the same story and...sell more newspapers.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Republicans use Fox.
Democrats use the Daily Show.
I use Slashdot comments.
Everyone has their news sources of choice. I'm fairly certain there is no sure source of information: even your own memory goofs up (see that game "Telephone" from elementary school). We do the best we can. The problem, these days, is that the "trusted" sources of information are going for the excitement factor rather than the truthiness factor. So "Aliens land in LA!" takes precedence over "Mexican immigrants take boat to San Diego".
I'm not sure who is to blame here, but I think it's desire for money. Whatever sells goes on the front page.
The volume of traffic captured isn't as important as the actual traffic received.
According to the low volume making it ok, if someone could steal 100 bytes off your 600gb hard drive, you'd be ok with that because it is such a small percentage. If that 100 bytes contained everything needed to use your credit card, would you still feel the same? It's the data that is important, not the volume.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Now they've hijacked Slashdot!
off topic, but I'm surprised most of Europe isn't reconsidering there open relationships with the US due to serious human right concerns...
If you look at page 244 of the government report in TFA it does make the 15% claim.
I've always loved when someone talking about cyber security during a congressional hearing would step into the room and talk about the **millions** of attacks lodged against their systems every year. These figures are useless because they include random crap that goes on everywhere not actual directed attacks yet they are endlessly paraded around for political effect.
See page 237 for a sample of how useless official reports propogated by people with an agenda can be. Nice graph...why is 2010 LOWER?
"The Defense Department explained the lower figures as resulting from measures taken to mitigate threats before they reach the threshold that merits an incident log entry"
Translation: We fixed our counter to include less useless noise contributed by automated worm propogation, botnets and random nmap scans..etc. One could argue due to not having any real information that their approach they applied more active filters to ignore the traffic but the end result (filtering of traffic that was never really a credible threat) is the same in either case.
At the same time they seem to have the guts to show figures from all previous years anyway without any attempt to adjust them retroactivly given their increased knowledge/admission the previous metrics are inaccurate when more information from improved threat detection techniques are applied.
Then you should not be using the internet. Honestly if you think your data is so important that even after encrypting you are worried someone might get a hold of it, then you should be using a private network or good old sneaker net.
why, I guess it is okay then to say that they HIJACKED any traffic at all. Trust China, they are our friends. It is Fox news that is the terror. What a bunch of buffoons.
anyone who has actually worked in IT containing real TS or SCI data knows it's all on private lines. Do a traceroute from a TS or higher computer to another TS or higher computer and you'll never see a router or node NOT in the .mil domain. sorry folks, they don't use cogent bandwidth and TS servers aren't housed in the same datacenter as your pr0n.
***And people wonder why the USA flew and rolled so easily into Iraq a few years back after the Chicoms had installed their sophisticated electronic countermeasures (try tit-for-tat).
It's a reverse-conspiracy ploy to drum up publicity for a faltering site...