China systematically hijacks internet traffic

Researchers have mapped out a series of internet traffic hijacks and redirections that they say are part of large espionage and intellectual property theft effort by China.

The researchers, Chris Demchak of the United States Naval War College and Yuval Shavitt of the Tel Aviv University in Israel, say in their paper that state-owned China Telecom hijacked and diverted internet traffic going to or passing through the US and Canada to China on a regular basis.

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China Telecom is able to divert the traffic by announcing bogus routes via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that governs data flows between Autonomous Systems, the large networks operated by telcos, internet providers and corporations.

After the traffic was copied by China Telecom for encyption breaking and analysis, it was delivered to the intended networks with only small delays. Demchak and Shavitt said.

Such hijacking is difficult to detect as China Telecom has multiple points of presence (PoPs) in North America and Europe that are physically close to the attacked networks, causing almost unnoticeable traffic delivery delays despite the lengthened routes.

China in comparison does not allow overseas telcos to establish PoPs in the country, and has only three gateways into the country, in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. This isolation protects the country’s domestic and transit traffic from foreign hijacking.

Remember when the (Never to sufficiently damned) Obama Administration gave away control of Internet routing to the Globalists?  And now we’re here.  It gets worse every year.  And will until the USA starts playing hardball against the Chinese.  As the article suggests…

…then an appropriate defense policy in response could state that no traffic to or from the US or ally is allowed to enter a China Telecom PoP in the US or in the ally’s networks,” the researchers suggested.

Such a policy could be inserted into BGP routing tables as required for automatic implementation.

President Trump would do it, but it would be very hard to enact if we lose the House.