A Chinese state-owned telecommunications company has been "hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries," according to an academic paper published this week by researchers from the US Naval War College and Tel Aviv University.
The culprit is China Telecom, the country's third-largest telco and internet service provider (ISP), which has had a presence inside North American networks since the early 2000s when it created its first point-of-presence (PoP).
PoPs are data centers that do nothing more than re-route traffic between all the smaller networks that make up the larger internet.
Are we really cool with this? It seems like a prime avenue for Chinese intelligence gathering and actual sabotage. The article notes that because China's internet is walled off from the world, it needs outposts in the West to really operate "BGP hijacks" effectively in the West that redirect traffic for whatever purpose they want them in their domain for a while. The paper states:
The prevalence of and demonstrated the ease with which one can simply redirect and copy data by controlling key transit nodes buried in a nation's infrastructure requires an urgent policy response.
In the past I wondered if the Internet could be physically attacked. But if you can physically control it, why would you attack it?
