The US Defence Department is aware that Internet traffic was re-routed briefly through China earlier this year, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday, referring to what a congressionally appointed panel has described as a hijack.
State-owned China Telecom sent a false notice that caused traffic to Secretary of Defence Robert Gates' office and other US government, military and corporate sites to go through China during an 18-minute stretch on April 8, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission charged in its annual report on Wednesday.
Marine Colonel David Lapan, a Defence Department spokesman, said, "We're aware that on the 8th of April ... Internet traffic was re-routed through China." He added at one point that he did not know if "we've determined whether that particular incident ... was done with some malicious intent or not." He later said there was no evidence that anything malicious had occurred, a position he repeated when pressed about the discrepancy in his remarks.
In Beijing, China's Foreign Ministry on Friday condemned the commission's report to the US Congress on China's military capabilities and economic policies, saying it distorted reality and was symptomatic of Cold War thinking. China Telecom separately has denied the charge that it "hijacked" US Internet traffic by sending false notifications that prompted other servers to route traffic through China on the assumption that it was the shortest route.
The commission said evidence did not clearly show whether the incident was perpetrated intentionally "and, if so, to what ends. However, computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities," the report said. Commissioner Larry Wortzel, a retired US Army colonel who served two tours as a military attache in China, told reporters that the incident could have let someone mine email addresses and then send authentic-looking messages bearing attachments with malicious code or other harmful software.
"When I see things like this happen, I ask: 'Who might be interested in all the communication from the entire Department of Defence and the federal government? It's probably not a graduate student from Shanghai University,'" Wortzel said. Lapan, the Pentagon spokesman, said the Defence Department's internal networks - the Internet's so-called dot.mil domain - would not have been affected by any improper rerouting of traffic through Chinese servers.
"We do have tools to protect any of the traffic that goes outside" the internal networks, he added, referring to encryption and devices that warn when Internet traffic is being re-routed.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who led a Senate Intelligence Committee cyber task force that submitted a classified report to the panel in July on cyber threats, said on Wednesday that certain threats cannot be countered without the US government's unique "authorities and capabilities."