Leakage of European mobile traffic to the Chinese network for two hours

On Thursday, for more than two hours, one of China's largest Internet service providers forced much of the European mobile traffic to be redirected via its own servers.

China Telecom has already been involved in similar incidents. For about 18 minutes in April 2010, about 15% of global Internet traffic suddenly went through Chinese servers. This included traffic to and from the US government and military sites, including NASA. Commercial sites of companies such as Dell and Microsoft have been affected in the same way.

Thursday's incident, resulting from what is known as a BGP route leak, reportedly swallowed considerable amounts of mobile traffic from service providers in France, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Users would have experienced significant slowdowns in data speed.

At the time of writing this document, China Telecom has still not been formally accused of intentionally causing the leak of routing, although the duration of the episode is unusual, according to experts, and that such incidents can be malicious.

As ZDNet reported in October, academic researchers from US Naval War College and Tel Aviv University have described China Telecom's behavior as highly suspect, revealing that the company had "transparently diverted the US domestic and inter-American traffic and redirected to China, weeks and months. While BGP leaks can be explained by common configuration errors, the incidents investigated by the researchers suggested a "malicious intent," they said.

"Two hours, it's a long time for a routing leak of this magnitude to remain outstanding, which is degrading global communications," said Doug Madory, director of the division's Internet badysis division. Oracle.

Leaks on BGP routes (so-called after the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that helps routers determine the best route to a particular network destination) are not uncommon. They can result when an autonomous system (PA) illegally announces that it can provide traffic to blocks of IP addresses, which are grouped by network prefixes. This often happens by mistake and there are often few safeguards in place because BGP trusts all default AP ads.

Thursday, a major data center in Switzerland, Safe Host, filtered more than 70,000 links to China Telecom, which then announced the links on the Internet, causing the diversion of huge volumes of traffic to European networks via its own servers .

The incident shows that BGP route leaks remain a critical issue for global communications, said Madory, adding that China Telecom clearly had "neither the basic routing guarantees" nor the proper procedures in place. "To detect and repair them quickly". inevitably. "