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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)."
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.
I certainly didn't. When I saw TFA was from "foxnews.com" I thought "This is going to be entirely reasonable and free of any fear-mongering."
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)?
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 /.
Of course. Everybody should know by now that 95% of statistics are made up on the spot.
14% of all people know THAT!
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.
Yeah, I thought that was pretty suspicious too. Until I found this reference on a website held in the highest esteem.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
Who gives a shit? What I want to know is: Is it possible? If yes, how can we fix it?
I'm being Insightful or I'm trying to be funny. Seriously, no trolling! Maybe!
***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...
Bathe, shave, and get a job. Or, with props to Animal House, "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, Son."