The gist of things it that the mainland Chinese network operators allowed the anycasted routes for the I-root in China to leak outside of their networks and into the global BGP routing table. If you made a DNS request to the I-root during that leak, and the best route to the I-root prefix was the leaking route from China, then your DNS traffic went through the great firewall and was altered accordingly.
Finally, I want to give the article the benefit of the doubt with regard to this:
And he said he believes there were more instances of Web traffic
being diverted to China, or "hijacked," around that time, but
wouldn't elaborate. "I believe it happened more than twice,"
Joffe said. "I can't comment on how many times because the
information is not generally public."
but many views of the BGP routing table are public (http://routeviews.org) and/or fairly well monitored for hijackings, etc. by network operators and others like Renesys and BGPMon (http://bgpmon.net/). Unless this is occurring only within China's regional networks, I expect we would've heard something about this already.
The gist of things it that the mainland Chinese network operators allowed the anycasted routes for the I-root in China to leak outside of their networks and into the global BGP routing table. If you made a DNS request to the I-root during that leak, and the best route to the I-root prefix was the leaking route from China, then your DNS traffic went through the great firewall and was altered accordingly.
Finally, I want to give the article the benefit of the doubt with regard to this:
but many views of the BGP routing table are public (http://routeviews.org) and/or fairly well monitored for hijackings, etc. by network operators and others like Renesys and BGPMon (http://bgpmon.net/). Unless this is occurring only within China's regional networks, I expect we would've heard something about this already.