This is an act of war. China to Obama - F'UCK You

Internet Traffic from U.S. Government Websites Was Reportedly Routed Via Chinese Servers

Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic -- including data from the Pentagon, the office of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other U.S. government websites -- was briefly redirected through computer servers in China last April, according to a congressional commission report obtained by the Washington Times.

It was immediately unclear whether the incident was deliberate, but the April 18 redirection could have enabled malicious activities and potentially caused an unintended "diversion of data" from many U.S. government, military and commercial websites, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission states in a report to Congress.

A draft copy of the report, which was viewed by the Washington Times, is to be released on Wednesday, and states that .gov and .mil websites were affected by the redirection, including websites for the Senate, all four military services, the office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and "many others," including websites for firms like Dell, Yahoo, IBM and Microsoft.

"Evidence related to this incident does not clearly indicate whether it was perpetrated intentionally and, if so, to what ends," the report reads. "Regardless of whether Chinese actors actually intended to manipulate U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic, China's Internet engineers have the capability to do so."

The report also notes, according to the Washington Times, that China has a history of "malicious computer activities" that "raise questions about whether China might seek intentionally to leverage these abilities to assert some level of control over the Internet, even for a brief period."

Citing a "networked authoritarianism," the report noted China's considerable control over the Internet inside the country. Google recently issued a call to Western governments, including the United States, to challenge Internet censorship as a restraint on global trade.

Wow !!! get some teenage hackers and hire them , they do enough damage to our computers here
let them loose on the chinese goverment sites... could that be a new job creation ? wow .. Im like the president and stuff... lol

Is it just me or do the Chinese seem to be getting more daring during the last 10 or so years?

(11-16-2010 04:01 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Is it just me or do the Chinese seem to be getting more daring during the last 10 or so years?

That goes back a long way , they have people here and documented
cases that go back further than that... maybe the last 20 years
and I guess your right they are making a more of a show about it now.

This is actually fairly simple to do... and it doesn't require a breach on behalf of anything related to the sites involved. All they have to do is get hold of a major internet backbone router and change routes between a handful of subnets, and it is done. Granted, they have to have a TON of bandwidth available on their end to pull it off. Even then, most ISPs and large web sites keep an eye on routes to their data centers and would notice it almost immediately, allowing them to know something is going on.

(11-16-2010 04:01 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Is it just me or do the Chinese seem to be getting more daring during the last 10 or so years?

They stole our nuclear secrets under Clinton. Bold and brazenly produced a warhead almost identical to one of ours. They know what works and we haven't been able to counter for some time.

How is this for a "shovel ready" job. Employ an army of hackers to break into their systems. China would probably infiltrate that group as well.

We need full a$$ kicken mode for the Chinese, or we may be speaking Chinese in the future.

China only did it because they were tired of the NSA being the only ones to spy on all internet traffic in the United States.

(11-17-2010 11:40 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  China only did it because they were tired of the NSA being the only ones to spy on all internet traffic in the United States.

Did the NSA redirect China's internet traffic including military for 18 minutes?

Remember when China created a firestorm for blowing an old satellite to smithereens in orbit, just to show us their capability. To me, this is the same thing. I heard they created 10,000+ pieces of space debris which we have to track.

(11-17-2010 11:52 AM)SumOfAllFears Wrote:  

(11-17-2010 11:40 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  China only did it because they were tired of the NSA being the only ones to spy on all internet traffic in the United States.

Did the NSA redirect China's internet traffic including military for 18 minutes?

Remember when China created a firestorm for blowing an old satellite to smithereens in orbit, just to show us their capability. To me, this is the same thing. I heard they created 10,000+ pieces of space debris which we have to track.

I think that point that GTS is making is that so much of the internet backbone is controlled by US companies (AT&T, Level 3, Verizon, etc. etc.) that the US gets away with it without others noticing.

The 18 minutes in which this issue was going on is an issue, but it is due to the design of the internet. Having routers "announce" their subnets can cause a lot of issues such as this... hell, things like this happen all the time thanks to idiot network engineers misconfiguring their hardware. At the end of the day the other network operators immediately catch the issue and either revert the routing table or remove that announced route all together. The Chinese can do this all they want, but they won't do more damage than a handful of hours at most in this type of attack.

I think the much scarier deal is with network routers, firewalls, and switches made in China. They found Chinese knockoff Cisco hardware in government agencies a few years back... everything looks exactly the same but the iOS is modified before being preloaded on the hardware. The United States has had to do a lot of work to improve their IT supply chain to try to keep this from happening... of course, with Cisco (and most other technology companies) building everything in China it is very hard to decipher the real from the knockoff equipment.

(11-17-2010 11:52 AM)SumOfAllFears Wrote:  

(11-17-2010 11:40 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  China only did it because they were tired of the NSA being the only ones to spy on all internet traffic in the United States.

Did the NSA redirect China's internet traffic including military for 18 minutes?

Remember when China created a firestorm for blowing an old satellite to smithereens in orbit, just to show us their capability. To me, this is the same thing. I heard they created 10,000+ pieces of space debris which we have to track.

nearly 1000 pieces > 10cm, 35,000 pieces over 1cm. According to this article, the debris is going to be long-lived. I thought that it would mostly dissipate over a couple of years, but it's colossal stupidity to have blow up a satellite at that altitude.

(11-17-2010 11:39 AM)SumOfAllFears Wrote:  We need full a$$ kicken mode for the Chinese, or we may be speaking Chinese in the future.

and here I am thinking i'm gonna need to learn spanish. where are my rosetta stone DVDs?