China 'hijacks' 15% of world internet traffic

[Walsingham]

Story

 

 

When does 'gently encouraging reform through economic engagement' become "I have in my hand a piece of paper"?

[Gorth]

You didn't really expect future conflicts not to happen on the information infrastructure level too?

 

Maybe it was the cyber equivalent of a nuclear test

 

Could also be technical incompetency.

[Gorgon]

I'd be more worried about the NSA. If you believe the EU parliament they are already heavily involved in industrial espionage.

[Gorgon]

The Chinese government holds a copy of an encryption master key which could be used it to break into redirected traffic.

 

 

That sounds really interesting, but what does it mean. That they have found a method to break all encryption ?. I'm assuming that's nothing new, and that all you need is time and processing power, or that they have found a way to quickly break a specific kind of encryption, in which case it might be a good idea for the rest of us to you know, change it.

Edited November 18, 2010 by Gorgon

[Moose]

I think it just means they own the key that was used to create other keys used to encrypt/decrypt data. This means they can decrypt anything by recreating the keys using the same master key.

[Gorgon]

Well, wouldn't people in the know immediately start using different algorithms ?. Seems to me it would make the affected software versions more or less worthless.

[Rosbjerg]

Unless they want China to take over the interwebs?

[Moose]

Let's be clear about this, the data was not hijacked. It was routed either as part of a U.S based Chinese telecom company, or from a U.S owned telecom company to the Chinese (for what purpose I don't know, load balancing?).

 

What I'm saying is it was given to China freely, they have not hacked it from the U.S. I suspect this is why the own the master key, because they are either part of coallition of network providers, or the traffic in question was actually originating on a Chinese owned provider.

[Humodour]

In terms of shady stuff the Chinese government IS involved in - they're generally known have a cyber warfare wing in their army which loves to play with botnets.

 

It doesn't help that the Chinese people generally stubbornly refuse to upgrade away from IE 6 - a bigger gift to cyber criminals (and hence the Chinese government) there never has been. Wouldn't be surprised if most of the botnets on Chinese computers are sate-run, as both a tool to spy on Chinese citizens as well as a reserve force to muster in the event they decide to launch a cyber attack on some target.

Edited November 18, 2010 by Krezack

[Walsingham]

You didn't really expect future conflicts not to happen on the information infrastructure level too?

 

Maybe it was the cyber equivalent of a nuclear test

 

Could also be technical incompetency.

 

I guess it could be the way primitive man first found out he could use hunting spears for murdering people. By accident!

 

The 'fact' is that they simply swallowed a portion of all internet traffic for a time. To my primitive understanding that has to be significant.

 

To Gorth I'd say that yes it was only a matter of time before we saw information warfare being conducted with physical connections to the mediums of information exchange. But all the same, I'm going to indulge a maudlin moment of sadness that yet more of humanity's daily toil will be devoted to a completely new dimension of bashing one another rather than grappling with the many natural ills which threaten us.

[Humodour]

I guess I really should post this... China isn't the only country capable of information warfare and anybody who thinks the US (and NATO more generally) wouldn't be able to mount a vigourous defence and counterattack is probably very incorrect. I doubt the CIA, NSA, FBI, NASA, DARPA, etc have sat on their laurels thinking "gee, I hope nobody learns how to hack on a global scale - that might not be good!" for 20 years.

 

We don't know who did the following (a vigilante hacker?), if it was even a country or what (Israel or US?), but here is an example of a botnet being designed and controlled to interfere with Iran's nuclear weapons production: http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/0347...chment?from=rss

 

And American departments are known to publish white papers on controlling botnets and hijacking existing botnets for the country's defence.

 

And if China can do this with net traffic than it's safe to assume the US can do so with even more impact - they still basically own and control the infrastructure of the Internet and run things like ECHELON.

 

And of that I am glad. If it has to be a case of lesser of two evils, I'd very much rather the US spying on me than China.

[Hurlshort]

I'm actually a bit concerned that the US intelligence agencies aren't nearly as adept as they are on TV and in movies. I'm worried they are more like Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd.

[Humodour]

I'm actually a bit concerned that the US intelligence agencies aren't nearly as adept as they are on TV and in movies. I'm worried they are more like Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd.

 

I worry about this sometimes, too, but then you sometimes get hints from leaks or white papers that there's a LOT going on behind closed doors we don't know about. You just have to know where to look.

 

I mean US intelligence isn't one central entity. It's distributed amongst like one or two dozen departments, has had about a century of practice, has intelligence gathering capabilities all over the planet, has strong ties with the intelligence agencies of its allies, has the largest budget of any country in the world, has some of the brightest minds working within it - and that's a key point. Bright people don't like to sit around being idle. They like to think up new things, work on new projects, change the world, improve processes. Especially hackers and scientists. Just take a look at the stuff DARPA (technology) and NSA (IT) work on.

 

Of course, the worrying thing is many of these points would also apply to China and Chinese intelligence forces.

[Walsingham]

LOL bitterly @ Krez.

 

I love the notion that all US govt. agencies are furiously beavering away actually getting things done. Not simply running up enormous tabs on projects that arrive too late to be technically relevant, and never sharing with one another so they end up massively duplicating effort.

 

Krez, if the various agencies didn't see Al Qaeda coming, and we've had Islamic militancy since at least the time of the British Empire, then how likely is it that they saw the internet coming?

[Humodour]

LOL bitterly @ Krez.

 

I love the notion that all US govt. agencies are furiously beavering away actually getting things done. Not simply running up enormous tabs on projects that arrive too late to be technically relevant, and never sharing with one another so they end up massively duplicating effort.

 

Krez, if the various agencies didn't see Al Qaeda coming, and we've had Islamic militancy since at least the time of the British Empire, then how likely is it that they saw the internet coming?

 

They were involved with the Internet's construction and funding, and are still involved with its maintenance and operation. And they have a huge amount of crossover skills and capabilities from previous sigint stuff such as ECHELON and the telecommunications systems which preceded the Internet and which the Internet runs off. Not to mention that even if the Internet came out of nowhere and slammed them in the face, they've still had a good 20 to 40 years to slowly adapt.

 

Whilst I'm sure your view of them is a view they'd love to proliferate because it provides them a measure of security through obscurity, I think you'd be silly to write off America's intelligence agencies as run by a bunch of buffoons and operated by mindless lackeys. That's the US government, not the US government's intelligence agencies.

Edited November 19, 2010 by Krezack

[Calax]

Darpa was actually insturmental in the creation of the 'net (with DARPAnet). That said, I think the biggest problem is that these great minds in the intelligence community just have so much to sift through (I mean Echelon tries to go through everything said on the 'net and read it for specific buzzwords that then go on for further evaluation no?) that things generally get lost in the chaff.

[Orogun01]

Darpa was actually insturmental in the creation of the 'net (with DARPAnet). That said, I think the biggest problem is that these great minds in the intelligence community just have so much to sift through (I mean Echelon tries to go through everything said on the 'net and read it for specific buzzwords that then go on for further evaluation no?) that things generally get lost in the chaff.

They probably have programs running that are able to swift through the immense amount of data and organize it so that its easier for them to analyze. Sort of having their work "pre-chewed" before they bite. Still it would take a boatload of analyst to match 15% of the internet (even without counting all that porn).

[Calax]

Darpa was actually insturmental in the creation of the 'net (with DARPAnet). That said, I think the biggest problem is that these great minds in the intelligence community just have so much to sift through (I mean Echelon tries to go through everything said on the 'net and read it for specific buzzwords that then go on for further evaluation no?) that things generally get lost in the chaff.

They probably have programs running that are able to swift through the immense amount of data and organize it so that its easier for them to analyze. Sort of having their work "pre-chewed" before they bite. Still it would take a boatload of analyst to match 15% of the internet (even without counting all that porn).

Well, that's my point... there's so much that the programs have to sift through that even if they reduced the load by 90% you'd probably still be wayyy behind.

[Orogun01]

Darpa was actually insturmental in the creation of the 'net (with DARPAnet). That said, I think the biggest problem is that these great minds in the intelligence community just have so much to sift through (I mean Echelon tries to go through everything said on the 'net and read it for specific buzzwords that then go on for further evaluation no?) that things generally get lost in the chaff.

They probably have programs running that are able to swift through the immense amount of data and organize it so that its easier for them to analyze. Sort of having their work "pre-chewed" before they bite. Still it would take a boatload of analyst to match 15% of the internet (even without counting all that porn).

Well, that's my point... there's so much that the programs have to sift through that even if they reduced the load by 90% you'd probably still be wayyy behind.

It's probably made on a piece by piece basis, if the programs only released the results at the end of their analysis what you say would probably be true. More likely that data is constantly being processed for analysis so that it doesn't pile up. With priority/privileged information being at the top of the list.

[Humodour]

ECHELON uses data mining techniques. Most of it is automated.

[Orogun01]

ECHELON uses data mining techniques. Most of it is automated.

But those are made on a daily basis, right? We are talking of an emergency scenario here, such as China stealing our info. Such things require some human involvement to max the response time to the possible crisis.

[Hiro Protagonist]

China says "all your Internets belong to us"

 

They're only catching up to the US, who currently does these things more discreetly.

[Orogun01]

China says "all your Internets belong to us"

 

They're only catching up to the US, who currently does these things more discreetly.

But so far the US is not known for blocking access to the web like China. If they gain more cyberwarfare capability we may have more incidents like this; the military equivalent of a weapons test.