China Hijacked 15% of US Internet Traffic-and no one noticed

The Internet, though ironically created for communications during a nuclear war, is based on trust. The trust that all nodes on the Internet are equal and when connecting from one website to another the connections will take the shortest or fastest route. But what if someone said that they were the best route, best no matter what? What would happen is that all Internet traffic would pass through that point. That’s exactly what China did for 18 minutes last April:

For 18 minutes in April, China’s state-controlled telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, including data from U.S. military, civilian organizations and those of other U.S. allies.

This massive redirection of data has received scant attention in the mainstream media because the mechanics of how the hijacking was carried out and the implications of the incident are difficult for those outside the cybersecurity community to grasp, said a top security expert at McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated Internet security company.

Scary? Yeah that’s an understatement. You see another whole part of the trust network are our much trusted and relied upon SSL certificates. We trust that certificate owners won’t decrypt the messages that use their certificates when they aren’t supposed to. We assume that when our data is encrypted to go to our bank or Gmail or shop online that the only person decrypting is the store. We assume that the certificate sender is sending us the correct public-private keypair. Yeah, but guess who besides folks like Apple, Microsoft and other big companies can sign certificates?

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