Millions of smartphone users in Europe—Switzerland, Holland and France—were unable to download or upload files on their devices for more than two hours on June 6. Experts from U.S. tech company Oracle investigated and found that Chinese state-owned telecommunications company China Telecom “hijacked” the mobile traffic, a type of hacking which is called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking.
Europe Incident
Those who used mobile telecom services from Swiss Swisscom, Dutch KPN, French Bouygues Telecom, and Numericable-SFR discovered that their smartphones were not operating normally due to the extremely low data-transferring speed during lunch break on June 6.“Often, routing incidents like this only last for a few minutes, but in this case, many of the leaked routes in this incident were in circulation for over two hours,” Doug Madory, director of Internet Analysis at Oracle Dyn Global Business Unit, wrote in his analysis report after the BGP hijacking.
