در اقدامی بی سابقه چین 15 درصد ترافیک اینترنتی دنیا رو برای 18 دقیقه به سرقت برد China 'hijacks' 15 per cent of world's internet traffic

[دانه کولانه]

China 'hijacks' 15 per cent of world's internet traffic

The Internet has been echoing itself all week about the latest example of the digital ”China Threat”: A report in National Defense Magazine that quoted a researcher from McAfee’s security team saying that China Telecom rerouted 15% of the Internet’s traffic for 18 minutes through its domestic networks.
Now another researcher, one with more of a focus on the Internet’s global traffic flows and less on security hype, has a new estimate of that traffic hijack. And he says it was actually about a 1/1000 of McAfee’s claim.

Craig Labovitz at Arbor Networks has written a post on the company’s blog that analyze’s China’s overall traffic for the period McAfee has cited, and finds that its bump is nowhere near the Library-of-Congress-every-90-seconds that McAfee estimated. (The analogy comes courtesy of Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow James Lewis.)


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While traffic may have exhibited a modest increase to the Chinese Internet provider (AS23724), I’d estimate diverted never topped a handful of Gbps. And in an Internet quickly approaching 80-100Tbps, 1-3 Gbps of traffic is far from 15% (it is much closer to 0.015%).

Size matters. In this case, the U.S. China Security and Economic Commission’s report to Congress, published earlier this week, cited the hijack, though it didn’t use National Defense’s 15% number or come to any conclusions about China’s intentions.

The lesson of this story is not that the Internet is more secure than McAfee has claimed. BGP, the routing protocol that allowed China Telecom to–perhaps accidentally, perhaps not–redirect loads of traffic, remains a major weak point in the Internet’s security that’s been demonstrated again and again without any concrete fix.

But before researchers point the finger at China, perhaps they should try to agree on at least an order of magnitude–or three.

You can read Labovitz’ post here.