Could someone explain how out-of-ordinary these hijacks are? I thought network traffic is similar to connecting flights: it's not uncommon to fly from NY to Seo

Could someone explain how out-of-ordinary these hijacks are? I thought network traffic is similar to connecting flights: it's not uncommon to fly from NY to Seoul with a transit stop in China. Network traffic may follow a non-optimal path for various reasons, such as complicated deal/rebate structures among AS, third party ASN spoofing, technical failures within AS and state-sponsored hacks. The paper seemed to cherry-pick some examples of "hijacks" involving China. But it would be more convincing to show whether they are happening all over the world or are specific to China. In addition, network traffic at ISP level are never intended to be secure. That's why we have/need end-to-end encryption.