Domestic Internet traffic traveling inside the borders of Russia has repeatedly been rerouted outside of the country under an unexplained series of events that degrades performance and could compromise the security of Russian communications.
The finding, reported Thursday in a blog post published by Internet monitoring service Dyn, underscores the fragility of the border gateway protocol (BGP), which forms the underpinning of the Internet's global routing system. In this case, domestic Russian traffic was repeatedly routed to routers operated by China Telecom, a firm with close ties to that country's government. When huge amounts of traffic are diverted to far-away regions before ultimately reaching their final destination, it increases the chances hackers with the ability to monitor the connections have monitored or even altered some of the communications.
When Russia embarks on a policy of appeasement to China so Putin can focus on a pointless confrontation with NATO, which has neither the interest nor military capabilities to threaten Russia, this is the type of behavior that Putin has to just take--and like.
