 In a 300+ page report (PDF) today, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission provided the US Congress with a detailed overview of what's been happening in China—including a curious incident in which 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic suddenly passed through Chinese servers on the way to its destination. The mistaken routing information came from IDC China Telecommunications, and it was then picked up by the huge China Telecom. Here's how the Commission describes the incident, which took place earlier this year: 
 
 For about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, China Telecom advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed US and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese servers. Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, routing all traffic to about 15 percent of the Internet’s destinations through servers located in China. The state-owned company accused of "hijacking" the encrypted information, China Telecom, today denied "any hijack of internet traffic". For 18 minutes in April, China’s state-controlled telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, including data from U.S. military, civilian organizations and those of other U.S. allies.This massive redirection of data has received scant attention in the mainstream media because the mechanics of how the hijacking was carried out and the implications of the incident are difficult for those outside the cybersecurity community to grasp, said a top security expert at McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated Internet security company.In short, the Chinese could have carried out eavesdropping on unprotected communications — including emails and instant messaging — manipulated data passing through their country or decrypted messages, Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee said.Nobody outside of China can say, at least publicly, what happened to the terabytes of data after the traffic entered China.The incident may receive more attention when the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional committee, releases its annual report on the bilateral relationship Nov. 17.
– A report to Congress alleges that China briefly hijacked a chunk of the world's web traffic, including some from US military facilities, before sending it on its way. (The actual amount rerouted is in dispute.) China denies it, but tech writers are pretty sure it happened. Cause for alarm? A definite maybe. Bob Sullivan, MSNBC: "If there is a grey area between honest mistakes and outright cyber attack, these incidents probably fall right in the middle—if not a pre-planned testing of the waters, then certainly a happy accident with valuable results to be studied by would-be cyber-attackers." Nate Anderson, Ars Technica: "The culprit here was 'IP hijacking,' a well-known routing problem in a worldwide system based largely on trust." But as is usually the case with these things, "it's hard to know if anything bad happened here. The entire thing could have been a simple mistake. Besides, Internet traffic isn't secure and already passes through many servers outside of one's control." Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo: "Perhaps it wasn't a malicious move, but it certainly seems like a test to its network power. In any case, it seems like it can happen again at any time. I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable with the idea of China hijacking such a massive amount of information without explanation." Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee: “This is one of the biggest—if not the biggest hijacks—we have ever seen," the security expert tells National Defense Magazine. "And it could happen again, anywhere and anytime. What happened to the traffic while it was in China? No one knows.”