China Telecom reportedly hijacks Internet Traffic around the US and Canada and reroutes them to China

Now, that discussion is for some other day but we are here to discuss a new report out of the US. According to research conducted by researchers from US and Isreal’s Universities, China Telecom diverts internet traffic from US and Canada to China.

Talking more about this, China Telecom which is a government-owned telecom agency is reportedly rerouting traffic from US and Canada to its own country. This research was conducted with the help of setting up route tracking system by the Isreali University’s researcher.

This route tracking system is used for monitoring BGP announcements. This way, it can be tracked whether or not there is an attack or hijacking attempts made. This led to multiple occurrences of hijacking attempts being caught on this tracker from China Telecom over the past few years.

Do note that in 2016, China Telecom had diverted traffic between Canada and Korean government networks to its PoP in Toronto. This traffic was then forwarded to the China Telecom PoP on the US West Coast and sent to China which finally reached Korea.

Now, the reason for this rerouting is very grave and dangerous in nature. It is found out that China Telecom used to reroute this traffic from various origins in order to break encryption and analyze the data and then send it to the intended recipient. All this would be done with a very little delay which is barely noticeable and no one would know that something is not right. US and China have already signed an agreement in which both the countries have agreed not to hijack each other’s internet traffic.