Google BGP hijack: A tiny Nigerian ISP hijacked traffic destined for hubs data of Google. 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 detected and reported by BGPmon, an online service that tracks traffic paths through the ISP networks that make up the largestnetwork.
According to BGPmon, the incident was caused by a small Nigerian ISP company named MainOne Cable Company (AS37282), which announced to nearby access providers that it was hosting IP addresses that normally corresponded to the Google Data Centers network.
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 traffic hit the great firewall, terminating her router China Telecom,” 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 that could later be decrypted.
We can't know if the "bad" redirection of traffic through the Nigerian company was intentional or accidental, but the problem remains that BGP itself, a protocol developed in the 1980s, has not characteristics security and is still used today to interconnect ISP networks.
_____________________________
- Hoax the 19 million in a political house
- Subs4free: black on Greek website under
- Chrome Dino do you know the story of the game?
- Google Search China: revelations about laughter and crying
