According to a joint report released by the chair of Cyber Security at the U.S. Naval War College, and a professor at Tel Aviv University and member of its Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center, China Telecom has been hijacking internet traffic from the U.S. and Canada. The report claims that China Telecom has been abusing its points of presence around the world to divert and copy traffic. Some of the known points of abuse include Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, and New York. It was seen that over a six-month period in 2016, a significant amount of traffic between Canadian and government sites in South Korea was diverted to China. Other diverted traffic included traffic between the U.S. and an Italian Bank, six weeks’ worth of data from Sweden and Norway to the Japanese network of a large American news organization.
Analyst Notes
Many believe that this could possibly lead to a heavy push for change in reciprocity between communications organizations in the U.S. and Canada, and China. Currently, China does not allow carriers from the U.S. and Canada to have points of presence in China even though China Telecom has points of presence in the U.S. and Canada.
