Glitch diverts net traffic through Chinese ISP

Internet service providers in China briefly tainted network routing tables on Thursday, marking the second time in two weeks operators in that country have done so, IDG news reports. The bad networking information originated from IDC China Telecommunication and was soon retransmitted by China's state-owned China …

[Avalanche]

Incident or trial?

Is this really an incident, or are the Chinese simply trying out this technique to intercept communications?

[Dazed and Confused]

Snufu?

Are you sure this is a snafu? or are the "Chinese State Hackers" flexing their muscles?

Let's face it, most networking software was written in a younger more naive age of the world, but isn't it about time that something as key as this really needs to move onto a more secure footing.

[bill 20]

Hmmm....

....Accident? I think not.

Dry-run for future cyber-attacks?.......duh!!

[Neil Stansbury]

Yup

and even if it's not a dry-run, certainly a test to see how widespread such a proof of concept could be, and the only people that really know how widespread that "incident" was will be the people doing the routing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else...

think this might have been a test by certain shadowy organizations (either governmental or organized crime) of the ability to redirect networks for various nefarious attacks?

[Eddie Johnson]

Seriously?

Once is an accident, twice is a practice run, the next time will be a massive identity theft or industrial espionage. Why is anything from inside China allowed to propagate out without manual intervention? And that applies to every other country as well. No foreign network should be treated as trusted.

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree

Once is for practice, twice is for something we haven't heard of yet and may never discover. Secret services usually have a lot of things going all the time and this may have been a means to an end. Besides, 30.000+ affected networks is a pretty good smokescreen - noone is going to be able to figure out who was target and who was decoy.

I, for one, etc....

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe too!

I got a call early morning Friday from our China office saying the UK hosted company website was down. Phoned hosting Co in a panic only to be told there was no problem their end. Only then did I check from home (still bleary eyed) and I couldn't see our site from the UK either!!!!!

8.45 am UK time it all got better. Hosting company are still in denial! thanks El Reg for giving me something to show the MD who had steam coming out of every orifice!

[Winkypop]

Oooh nasty

"thanks El Reg for giving me something to show the MD who had steam coming out of every orifice!"

A cheap Chinese meal will do that to you every time...

[Uplink]

404 on Google Checkout?

Maybe that 404 page on Google Checkout was actually on a Chinese webserver rather than Google's? Just a thought.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm

Redirect traffic thru state owned ISPs. Capture said traffic. That's quite a lot of data to go through for any and all goodies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Accidently on purpose

I think safeguards need to be in place to block china originated changes, it is most liekly inteligence gathering just think of all the information being routed and recorded by the ISPs in china in justa few hours

[J 3]

Which country?

"a similar networking anomaly caused people in Chile to be redirected to Chinese networks, potentially blocking websites such as Facebook and YouTube, which are banned in that country."

Which country bans YouTube and Facebook, China or Chile? Sloppy writing or is my understanding of the Engrish?

Well, since I have friends in Chile, and they are accessing Facebook normally as far as I can tell, I'll assume you meant China there...

[Winkypop]

It was just...

It was just our very own "wrong-way" Conroy testing out his new you-beaut Aussie "Naughty Net Filter" [TM].

[Grumpy Fellow]

That's it for me!

I give up. Routing is just too difficult to secure. From now on it's circuit switched data and point-to-point protocol for me. I'll just sign off here with a +++, AT OK?

[asdf]

i speak engrish

All the internet traffic belong to us. Haha foreigners. First we make your toasters and now us you come for your data. Chairman Mao is happy dancing heaven.

[Captain Save-a-ho]

Problem is not BGP

ISP are quite notorious for avoiding the sort of common sense configurations that would help prevent this sort of thing from happening. BGP has more filtering/security mechanisms that all other routing protocols combined.

If I've learned anything over the last 15 years, generally someone didn't do their job when this happens. The routers just blindly forward packets as they're configured to. Put the safeguards in place that already exist and these incidents would happen even more rarely than they do.