Chinese firm ‘hijacked’ U.S. government web traffic: report

A Chinese telecommunications corporation briefly hijacked almost 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic in April, including data transmissions originating from the U.S. government, according to a U.S. congressional report released Wednesday.

On April 8, for 18 minutes, email and web page requests from around the world were routed through the servers of state-owned China Telecom, in an event that could ”compromise the integrity of supposedly secure encrypted sessions,” according to the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan panel established by Congress to monitor security issues related to Sino-U.S. relations.

The incident involved both commercial and governmental web traffic, affecting such companies as Yahoo! and Microsoft as well as all four branches of the U.S. military, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense and others, according to the report.

An official at the Department of Defense, meanwhile, said the department does ”not have information that suggests the April incident occurred,” adding that such an event would not have affected the department’s internal communications or endangered the security of its information.

However, experts note that the event could have compromised communications between U.S. government agencies and other entities, including foreign governments, with potentially serious ramifications for the security of those communications.

”Temporary custody of Internet traffic could possibly allow the perpetrators to break encryption schemes and gain access to supposedly secure data,” said Larry Wortzel, the commission’s vice chairman.

While emphasizing there is no proof that the incident was intentional, he noted that if so ”it would be classified perhaps as an attempt at cyber espionage that could possibly help in some other cyber activity, including an attack.”

Other experts shared Wortzel’s view that the incident was not deliberate. James Lewis, an expert on China’s cyber capabilities at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was one of them.

”If this was an intelligence exploit, it was clumsy,” Lewis said, adding that redirecting Internet traffic on such a large-scale would not only draw attention to the perpetrator, but would also produce an unmanageably large amount of information, most of which would be useless.

”It would be like diverting Niagara Falls to get a glass of water,” he said, adding that Beijing has much more sophisticated means for conducting espionage.

On the other hand, the incident illustrates the urgent need to update the Internet’s basic infrastructure, according to Lewis.

”The Internet is still running on technologies largely developed in the 1970s,” he said. ”It was originally designed for a few thousand users…Maybe we have to start saying the system might not be as robust as we like.”