From Computer World…
A report submitted to Congress on Wednesday by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission expressed concerns over what the commission claims is China’s growing ability to control and manipulate Internet traffic.
The report points to two specific incidents earlier this year where actions taken inside China had a direct impact on Internet traffic in the U.S. and other regions of the world.
The traffic hijacking affected U.S. government and military networks, including those belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Commerce, NASA and the U.S. Senate.
Commercial sites including those belonging to Microsoft, Dell and Yahoo were also affected.
It’s unclear if Chinese telecommunications firms did anything with the hijacked data, the commission said in its report. But the kind of access that Chinese authorities had to the data could enable surveillance of specific users or sites, disrupt transactions, prevent a user from establishing connections to specific sites or divert them to other spoofed sites, the report noted.
“Incidents of this nature could have a number of serious implications,” the report said.
“Incidents of this nature could have a number of serious implications.”
That’s sort of an understatement, isn’t it?