A large amount of the world's Internet traffic was temporarily rerouted through China Telecom earlier this year, according to a report to the U.S. Congress. Lasting at least 18 minutes, the hijack purportedly took place on April 8, triggered by a BGP routing announcement that caused routers to erroneously direct Internet traffic through China Telecom on its way to their final destination.

While it is not uncommon for routing mistakes to happen, the main question heavy on the minds of observers is whether what transpired was an accident, or an attempt to capture and snoop on Internet traffic. Regardless, vulnerabilities in the routing protocols that undergird the Internet mean that it can and will happen again. The Register is less sanguine, and puts it this way: "...the security of the global network [is], in many ways, reduced to the honor system."

In a detailed blog entry, Dmitri Alperovitch from McAfee conceded that there is no way to determine if the incident is malicious, or entirely an accident as suggested by China Telecom. I felt he summed up the situation aptly when he wrote: "We have no way of knowing...but it's clear that with this capability demonstrated publicly, sooner or later someone will use it for nefarious purposes."

For more on this story:
- check out this article from FierceGovernmentIT
- check out this article at The Register
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at PC World

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