China Telecom diverted internet traffic in U.S. and Canada, report finds

Robert Fife:

China Telecom, a state-owned telecommunications firm, has systematically diverted internet traffic in Canada and the United States by shunting it through its own network in an effort to commit espionage and steal intellectual property, two cybersecurity researchers say.

Yuval Shavitt of Tel Aviv University and Chris Demchak of the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., published a paper recently in Military Cyber Affairs, the journal of the Military Cyber Professionals Association, outlining how China has been rerouting Canadian and U.S. internet traffic via access points it has set up legally in North America, ostensibly to improve service for its customers.

Although the Chinese government has signed no-hacking agreements with numerous Western countries, including Canada and the United States, to prohibit direct attacks on computer networks, the accords did nothing to prevent the diverting of online traffic on key Western internet infrastructure, the authors say.