On Thursday, June 6th (9:43 am UTC), Europe’s leading mobile providers received a shock when a large chunk of the traffic destined to reach them was misdirected or rerouted to another path by the network of a Chinese state-operated telecom firm, China Telecom. The misdirection of the traffic continued for two hours and even more in some cases.
According to the details shared by an Internet-monitoring service, the internet’s global routing system, which is called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), was clearly hijacked by the Chinese telecom firm. The BGP route leak affected various mainstream mobile carriers across Europe.
What happened was that on early Thursday morning, a Swiss web hosting service provider Safe Host leaked over 70,000 BGP routes to China Telecom after which the Chinese firm announced these routes as its own. Due to this, the traffic for many mobiles carries including those in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland passed through China Telecom’s network to reach the desired destination.
Currently, it is unclear whether the leak was accidental or intentional. It is worth noting that some of the IP blocks affected in this incident were quite small but more specific than many of those included in legit announcements. This indicates that route optimizers were used to improve the network traffic, which might have caused Thursday’s route leak.
China Telecom also is known for propagating improper BGP announcements. For instance, in November 2018, an African ISP updated its BGP tables in order to improperly declare AS37282 as a leg ..
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