Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Internet traffic was routed via Chinese servers - Washington Times

Internet traffic was routed via Chinese servers - Washington Times: "Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic, including that of many U.S. government and military sites, was briefly redirected through computer servers in China in April, according to a congressional commission report due out this week.

It is not clear whether the incident was deliberate, but the capability could enable severe malicious activities including the diversion of data and the interception of supposedly secure encrypted Internet traffic, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission states in a report to Congress.

A draft copy of the report, which is to be released Wednesday but viewed by The Washington Times, reports for the first time that .gov and .mil websites were affected by the 18-minute-long April 8 redirection, including those for the Senate, all four military services, the office of the secretary of defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "and many others," as well as commercial websites including those of Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft and IBM.

The redirection, though brief, could have enabled 'surveillance of specific users or sites [and] ... could even allow a diversion of data to somewhere that the user did not intend,' the report states. The huge volume of traffic redirected could have been intended to cover a targeted attack on a single website or user."