China on Thursday denied US allegations that it “hijacked” highly sensitive Internet traffic — including e-mails sent to and from US military Web sites — earlier this year.
A state-owned telecoms company in China had access to 15 percent of global Internet traffic, including confidential e-mails from NASA and the US Army, for 18 minutes in April, according to an annual security report delivered to the US Congress on Wednesday.
The report said that the capture “could enable severe malicious activities” by China.
The state-owned company accused of “hijacking” the encrypted information, China Telecom, denied “any hijack of Internet traffic.”
Online security experts say the capture represents “one of the biggest hijacks” of sensitive information in the history of the Internet.
Relations between China and the US — No. 1 and No. 2 in the world respectively in terms of Internet users — have long been fraught when it comes to the Web.
Earlier this year US technology giant Google said it was to stop censoring results on its Chinese search engine, following a sophisticated and allegedly state-sponsored cyber attack directed at the company.
China earlier accused the US of making “groundless accusations” about restrictions on Internet freedom against the country.
The US report said that about 15 percent of global Internet traffic was routed through Chinese servers earlier this year, prompting worries that the country now has access to sensitive correspondence from US government bodies.
US commissioner Larry Wortzel raised concern on Wednesday that China would now “get the Internet addresses of everybody that communicated” with the US armed services’ chiefs of staff.
The rerouting began at a smaller Chinese Internet service provider called IDC China before being passed on to China Telecom, the report compiled by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said. Encrypted correspondence from the US Senate, the US Department of Defense and “many others” were among the huge amount of traffic captured by China.
Dmitri Alperovitch, a threat research analyst at Internet security firm McAfee, said the capture “is one of the biggest — if not the biggest hijacks — we have ever seen.”
“No one except China Telecom operators” know what happened to the traffic during those 18 minutes, Alperovitch added. “The possibilities are numerous and troubling, but definitive answers are unknown.”
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