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MostCynical [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Sydney Morning Herald [smh.com.au] has a front-page story detailing apparent Chinese redirection and interception of Australian internet traffic.

Internet traffic heading to Australia was diverted via mainland China over a six-day period last year. The diverted traffic from Europe and North America was logged as a routing error by the state-owned China Telecom, according to data released for the first time by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Naval War College in the US.

The targeting of data bound for Australia comes amid revelations China's peak security agency has overseen a surge in cyber attacks [smh.com.au] on Australian companies over the past year, breaching a bilateral agreement to not steal each other's commercial secrets.

The re-directions happened between the 7th and 13th of June last year and resulted in a small portion of the total internet traffic coming into Australia taking up to six times longer to arrive as it went via China. One of the researchers, says he believes the target of the attack was a UK cyber-security company with offices in Australia.

The data diversions were possible as China Telecom has 10 Points of Presence (PoPs) in North America. Foreign carries have no comparable infrastructure across mainland China.

China Telecom has long been regarded as a passive service provider, despite being state-owned, and therefore has attracted none of the suspicion of Chinese telecommunications providers like Huawei or ZTE.

In the research paper quoted in the article, three other examples of such diversions over the past two years are highlighted, including traffic from Scandinavia to the Japanese office of a major US media outlet being diverted via China.

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