State-owned company sucked in data for 18 minutes
In what’s believed to be one of the biggest data hijackings ever, security experts have confirmed that a state-run Chinese telecommunications company sucked in 15 per cent of all Internet traffic for 18 minutes last April. It’s hard to tell what happened to massive amount of data re-routed through China, though the possibilities include eavesdropping on unprotected communications like emails and instant messaging, manipulating the data passing through, or decrypting messages. Even more worrisome is the fact the targets of the hijackings were pre-selected destinations like military, intelligence and civilian networks in the United States and its allies. “Imagine the capability and capacity that is built into their networks,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee, the world’s largest Internet security company. “I’m not sure there was anyone else in the world who could have taken on that much traffic without breaking a sweat.”