DNS - Internet Security's Worst Nightmare Now a Chinese Reality

In April Forbes printed an interesting article about a major problem surprisingly few people have heard of - the possibility that China's intentionally hijacking the world's Internet traffic.

As Forbes columnist Trevor Butterworth explained it, "On March 24 Mauricio Vergara Ereche, a DNS administrator in Chile, noticed something distinctly odd in the routing of requests for Facebook, YouTube (News - Alert), Twitter and up to 30 other sites. Instead of retrieving the authoritative '.com' site, the Web users retrieved IP numbers located in China, which turned out to be completely different sites or error messages. It didn't happen with every request, but it did happen with three requests originating from Chile and one from California that were routed through a server in Sweden."

As Butterworth said, "Suddenly four people had been transported into China's rigidly controlled Internet, although by whom and whether by design is unclear."

No doubt you can see what Butterworth saw: "Westerners trying to access Facebook (News - Alert) were directed towards the same internal Chinese system of servers by a server inside China. Whether by error or design, China was redirecting global DNS traffic; its Great Firewall, which kept politically unacceptable material out, was sucking the outside world into the Chinese Internet. And if this could happen to Web sites, it could also happen to e-mail."

According to Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at Neustar, whom Butterworth calls "one of the few people on the planet who knows how the Internet really works," this was "a real world example of the Net security industry's worst nightmare.'

'For a long time, we have believed that China modifies DNS answers; no surprise there,' told CNET. 'They do it because they want to make sure that, for example, people inside China are subject to the censorship.'

But what was a surprise, he told CNET, was that a server inside of China was able to redirect Web traffic to servers inside that country.

Bert Hubert, founder of Dutch-based software provider PowerDNS.com, told CNET that 'It appears we can no longer see the Internet as a friendly shared resource and that strict boundaries will have to be put in place. The problem is the technology is not really there to make that happen.'