Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

For 18 Minutes, China Web-Jacked U.S. Government and Military Sites

by Terrence O'Brien on November 18, 2010 at 11:50 AM

china telecom
For about 18 minutes on April 8th, 2010, China proved just how easy it would be to hijack the Web. The country redirected 15-percent of global Internet traffic through its servers, affecting both commercial sites and government agencies. A report being published by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission says that sites for NASA, the Senate, all four branches of the military and the office of the Secretary of Defense were routed through Chinese servers. The cause appears to be faulty routes advertised by China Telecom, which fed site data through the home of the Great Firewall before it reached its final destination. Dell, Yahoo!, Microsoft and IBM were also affected by the Web-jacking.

What's not clear, though, is how or why the redirects took place. While the report makes the obvious points about the potential security issues surrounding the redirected traffic, the big question on most minds is never answered: was this a targeted attack? According to ABC News, the report makes no assertion that the attack was an explicit effort to collect data from foreign governments and agencies. It notes, however, that the commission has no way of knowing what China Telecom did with the data passing through its servers, if anything at all.

Tags: china, ChinaTelecom, CyberSecurity, government, hijack, military, politics, security, top, web

Comments

1

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular