WTF, Russia’s domestic Internet traffic mysteriously passes through Chinese routers

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/11/wtf-russias-domestic-internet-traffic-mysteriously-passes-through-china/

By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
Nov 9 2014

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. A similar 
concern emerged last year, when Dyn found big chunks of traffic belonging 
to US banks, government agencies, and network service providers had been 
improperly routed through Belarusian or Icelandic service providers.

[...]



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