China has been accused of hijacking the internet’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to carry out covert man-in-the-middle surveillance on Western countries and companies.
BGP governs how traffic is routed between subdivisions of the internet known as autonomous systems (AS). It ensures that traffic reaches the correct servers – meaning messing around with it is bad news.
The researchers claim China Telecom has essentially been doing the same again – abusing BGP to route international Net traffic via its POPs, of which it has eight located in the US and two in Canada.
These included months of ‘hijacking’ routes from Canada to Korea in 2016, which saw traffic take longer detours into China before completing its journey.
Or the traffic from the US to a bank in Milan, Italy which was diverted via China Telecom POPs in a way that only stood out because it never arrived.
One defence against BGP hijacking is TLS encryption. It doesn’t stop the rerouting but if someone diverts web, email or DNS traffic encrypted with TLS through their POP it should be unreadable.
Hi Raghaav,
Now a days it has become a norm that china is getting involved in some kind of cyber security incident. So this dosent come as a surprise to me. Hope people get well informed on the issue and take appropriate countermeasure.