Internet researchers say it's inaccurate to assert that a state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm rerouted 15 percent of worldwide Internet traffic to pass through Chinese routers for 18 minutes on April 8, 2010.

Indeed, a report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, at the bottom of the assertion, states that China Telecom changed Internet routing paths "to about 15 percent of the Internet's destinations through servers located in China."

What occurred was a change to routing tables used by the Border Gateway Protocol Internet routing system, not actual packet traffic, writes Craig Labovitz, chief scientist of Chelmsford, Mass.-based Arbor Networks.

"While we did observe modest changes in traffic volumes for carriers within China, the BGP hijack had limited impact on traffic volumes to or from the rest of the world," Labovitz says in a follow-up blog post.

An analysis by McAfee shows that of the 330,000 network routes that existed in routing tables at the time, 53,353 routing prefixes were "announced false," writes Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee vice president of threat research.

"It is very difficult to estimate how much of the traffic was actually redirected and the true estimate can only come from the owner of the network that has routed all of this traffic," he adds.

Researchers don't exclude the possibility that the re-routing was indeed an attack, they also note that BGP routing incidents are common and the China Telecom episode points to a systematic vulnerability in the Internet.

For more:
- read blog posts by Labovitz--his first take, and his follow up
- read a blog post by Alperovitch
- read an article by Ars Technica on the incident

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