(WICHITA, Kan.) — When you send an email, you trust that the only person reading that email is the person you addressed it to. But on April 8, 2010, China hacked forty percent of the US's internet usage, and collected tons of data for 18 minutes.
Data was sent through servers in Beijing before being sent back to the US. China says this was an accident, but some are not so sure.
Dr. Ravi Pendsi at Wichita State University is not accusing China of doing anything malicious, however he has a theory about how it happened. In his graduate level computer science class, Dr. Pendsi says that the government owned internet service provider, China Telecom, set up a rogue server that fooled trusted servers in the US and Europe to send it internet traffic.
During those 18 minutes, millions of emails, instant messages, passwords, web searches, and more found their way to servers in Beijing before being sent back. It's not known what the Chinese did with all of that internet traffic.
