Schwartz On Security: Chinas Internet Hijacking Misread

Core Internet security concerns arent as sexy as hyping Chinese attacks, but concern over the potential assault is misplaced and distracts from the need to fix whats really broken.

If China launches online attacks against the United States -- for example, diverting 15% of the Internet for a period of 18 minutes -- that demands a response.
Of course, a recent Congressional commission report
accused China
of having hijacked massive volumes of Internet traffic, including government, military and leading private companies websites, routing them through Chinese-controlled servers on April 8, 2010.
Accordingly, with the U.S. government bolstering its
Cyber Warfare Command
, one pertinent question is: Whats the threshold for when the U.S. should launch a cyber strike back?
Thankfully, no such strike was launched against China, as evidence of the countrys malfeasance quickly proved sketchy at best -- and a case of misplaced fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) at worst. Or in the words of the related
Time Magazine
story, Everybody Panic!
Experts shouting FUD back, however, thankfully hit the scene last Wednesday. In particular, Bob Poortinga, a senior analyst at high-technology engineering firm Technology Service Corp, estimated that at best, 1% of 2% of network prefixes -- not traffic -- had been hijacked globally and likely at a much lower level in the United States.
My concern is that this report will be presented to the U.S. Congress without being refuted by experts in the know, he said in a
post
to the North American Network Operators Group mailing list, in response to a related story in
National Defense
magazine. My request is that someone with some gravitas please issue a press release setting the facts straight on this matter.
On Friday, Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at network security firm Arbor Networks, came to the rescue. While traffic may have exhibited a modest increase to the Chinese Internet provider, Id estimate diverted traffic never topped a handful of Gbps, he said in a
blog post
. And in an Internet quickly approaching 80 to 100 Tbps, 1 to 3 Gbps of traffic is far from 15% (it is much closer to 0.015%). In other words, news reports misstated the scale of the event by a factor of 1,000, using a metric -- traffic volumes -- that Labovitz called imprecise, at best. Later that day, Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfees vice president of threat research -- one of the experts originally quoted over the alleged 15% of the Internet was hijacked by China episode -- said that National Defense and other outlets had misinterpreted his
original assessment
.
There is absolutely no proof that this was an intentional attack. Routing hijacks happen fairly frequently and most of them are accidental [in] nature,
he clarified
.
Likewise, in a later, more
in-depth analysis
, Arbor Networks Craig Labovitz reported seeing nothing characteristic of an actual hijack. Of course, that doesnt mean that China didnt actually attack the U.S., hiding the rerouting of a few machines with a smokescreen of thousands of bogus routes, he said. Or maybe, of course, this was just a typo in a configuration file.
Who can tell? In fact, no one, and that gets to a fundamental problem with the Internet: We often dont know if someone is trying to attack us, and when we do think its the case, the ease of
spoofing packets
means that well probably never trace attacks back to the real perpetrators.
Furthermore, concern over the potential Chinese attack is misplaced, said Labovitz, since inadvertent BGP route leaks and intentional hijacks have been part and parcel of Internet routing for the last 20 years, referring to the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) used to exchange routing information between routers.
Accordingly, rather than interpreting esoteric Internet traffic routing patterns as signs of malfeasance, he suggests getting to the root of the issue. Such as tackling security issues in BGP, encouraging adoption of the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to protect against data spoofing, and focusing efforts on blocking distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Addressing core Internet security concerns isnt as sexy as screaming about Chinese attacks. But in both the short and long run, fixing whats broken with core aspects of the Internet would prevent having to worry in the first place, or potentially misplaced military attacks. Just think how much more secure wed feel.

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Schwartz On Security: Chinas Internet Hijacking Misread