China’s internet hijacking: was it deliberate or not?

Deliberate or an accident? That was the question addressed in an American report released yesterday about the motives of a state-owned Chinese internet service provider who on April 8 this year rerouted an estimated 15 per cent of the world's internet traffic through its own servers for 18 minutes.

Not long - but long enough considering the traffic included highly sensitive American government and military data contained in emails.

With a similar incident having occurred a month earlier, the US government asked for a report to examine whether IDC China Telecommunications had deliberately tried to "hijack" classified information between bodies such as the military, Nasa and the Senate.

The report, by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, concluded: "Evidence related to this incident does not clearly indicate whether it was perpetrated intentionally and, if so, to what ends. However, computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities."

The 12-member Commission - established in 2000 to monitor American security interests in the light of closer economic ties with China - stopped short of directly accusing the Chinese government of cyber sabotage with its vice-chairman, Carolyn Bartholomew, issuing a measured accompanying statement.

"The massive scale and the extensive intelligence and reconnaissance components of recent high-profile, China-based computer exploitations suggest that there continues to be some level of state support for these activities," she said, warning that cyber attacks "appear to be more sophisticated than techniques used in the past".

The New York Times was more frank in its analysis of the rerouting incident, suggesting two possibilities. First, that it had allowed Chinese authorities the time to use its "encryption master key" to unlock sensitive information contained in American governmental emails, which are normally encrypted. Second, that the Chinese were testing a so-called "cyber weapon" for use against foreign governments in any future international conflict.

This was dismissed by Lu Benfu, director of the Internet Development Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In an interview with China's Global Times, a state-run paper, he said: "The Web information flow is controlled by the US, while China just holds a branch line of the global traffic. So this kind of accusation is technically unfeasible." ·