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)."

Comments

Only more Evidence

[x1n933k]

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]

Re:Only more Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet, this is what you demand in political journalists. If they don't praise Obama, or fail to ignore it when he talks about the 54 states, you rant and pull out the pitchforks and torches.

What do you expect to end up with when you shut down all opposing views. Politics is the news leader, and when you screw that up enough, why should you expect the rest of the media to act any differently? You don't want facts, you want a happy meal with apple pie.

Re:Only more Evidence

[thijsh]

Excellent example of non-technical journalism which blindly copies something without understanding it or looking in to it. I can already imagine them reading something about some master key to decrypt communication, and the Chinese also have a master key, so they put 2 and 2 together and think that the Chinese can decrypt anything... Don't bother checking facts, FUD sells!

There are certain keywords to look for to know if the journalist knows what he/she is talking about (regardless of subject). Note: "there was speculation that ... " == "we're making this shit up as we go along, but try to cover our weasel asses"

Re:Only more Evidence

[pedrop357]

This panic over misinformation could be useful when discussing encryption and the clipper chip proposals of the mid 90s and the newer escrow law proposals.

If the government were to mandate a back door, there would effectively be a master key that could be leaked, requiring a complete digital "changing of the locks" every time the key were suspected of being compromised.

It's not the 15% that mattered

[goombah99]

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?

Re:It's not the 15% that mattered

[gsslay]

The point is if a foreign government can redirect even a few messages that it chooses it is not good.

So if it wasn't a foreign government it would be ok? Remember, all governments are foreign to some of us.

Not surprising at all

[GPLHost-Thomas]

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!

Re:Not surprising at all

[BrokenHalo]

You don't know how many times I have read that all spams are coming from China when they in fact come from USA.

This (in my experience) is true. I haven't quantified this figure very recently (I have more useful ways to spend my time, since my anecdotal impression is unchanged), but last time I checked the proportion was over 98%.

However, the Chinese take the prize in the number of scam sites. I apologise in advance if the following comes across as racist, but sometimes it seems almost as if there is some wide and deep-seated national streak of dishonesty that they have to feed in order to validate their existence. I never cease to find it scary that our governments and larger corporations all fall over themselves scrambling to do business with the Chinese when they keep showing us, time and again, that they are not to be trusted.

Sounded alarmist

[Anonymous Coward]

The post that was referred to sounded alarmist in the first place so I doubt most people gave it too much thought.

Media abuses this formula too much these days...

[grumpyman]

1. China
2. FUD
3. ???
4. Profit!

PS: Media includes sites such as /.

Re:Inconceivable!!!

[pitchpipe]

This is why Slashdot (News for Nerds) is "news" like Fox News is "news" - it's not.

Maybe. But you'll never see a correction to an overblown sensationalist headline that Fox News put out hit the front page of foxnews.com. That's the difference.

Re:Inconceivable!!!

[bsDaemon]

Cowboy Neal also cries fewer Crisco tears into his Golden Grams in public than Glen Beck does. That's another (pretty big) difference.

Volume doesn't matter

[SnarfQuest]

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.