A state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm rerouted 15 percent of worldwide Internet traffic to pass through a Chinese Internet service provider for 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, including U.S. .gov and .mil traffic, says an annual report from a congressional commission.

Among the agencies affected by China Telecom's alteration of network routing tables were the departments of Commerce and Defense--including the military services and the office of the secretary of defense--NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in a report publically released Nov. 17.

The re-routing could have served to conceal a single targeted attack, or might have allowed Chinese actors to launch a man in the middle attack against encrypted traffic, the report states.  

The report adds that the commission has no way to determine whether an attack did occur, and China Telecom issued a statement denying that it had hijacked Internet traffic.

"These reports by foreign media are completely groundless," Wang Yongzhen, a China Telecom spokesman, told official Chinese newswire Xinhua.

The congressional commission also notes that Chinese attempts to control access to websites within its borders also led in March 2010 to some U.S. and Chilean Internet users being unable to access social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

A Swedish Domain Name Server instance located in Beijing misdirected requests for those sites to the wrong server, treating international traffic as if it originated from inside China. That condition lasted for days until Swedish DNS root administrations disabled requests to the Beijing clone.

That incident does not appear to have been an act of deliberate cross-border censorship the report states, but it does highlight the ripple effects Chinese censorship can have on the Internet.

For more:
- download the report (.pdf), or go to the commission's home page

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