Google BGP hijack: A tiny Nigerian service provider Internet it captured traffic destined for Google's data centers. The incident, called a BGP hijack, happened yesterday, Nov. 12, between 13:12 p.m. and 14:35 p.m. Pacific Time, according to Google.
The incident was first identified and reported by BGPmon, an online service that monitors traffic routes through the largest Internet ISPs.
According to BGPmon, the incident was caused by a small Nigerian ISP named MainOne Cable Company (AS37282), which notified nearby providers accesss that it hosted IP addresses that normally corresponded to Google's network of data centers.
BGPmon reports that the Nigerian ISP said it was "accidentally" hosting 212 Google network prefixes on five different waves, for a total of 74 minutes.
The routing announcement leaked to other internet service providers, inviting more and more providers to send to Google traffic on the MainOne network instead of the regular BGP routes.
According to experts from ThousandEyes:
"We observed that this leak was primarily promoted by transit providers and did not affect networks Consumer ISPs”, said Ameet Naik, director of ThousandEyes.
"All the traffic hit the great firewall, shutting down China Telecom router," Naik added.
So whichever traffic it came to the Nigerian company, it was later abandoned, which did not allow users to connect to Google networks.
The incident has naturally caused great concern online, especially for cyber security and networking experts.
BGP hijacks are considered extremely dangerous, as they allow unauthorized networks to monitor, analyze and record sensitive information which could be deciphered later.
We can't know if the "bad" traffic redirection through the Nigerian company was intentional or accidental, but the problem still lies with BGP itself, a protocol developed in the 1980s that lacks security features and is still in use until today for theconnection of ISP networks.
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