China’s 18-Minute Mystery – Renesys Blog.
This is absolutely the best analysis I’ve read of the China internet hijack incident in April 2010.
While the hijacking happened as described in the Congressional report that was released earlier this week, the probability that this was done to steal information is very low. There are far stealthier and surgical approaches available and used on a daily basis.
On the other hand, it shows off the vulnerability of BGP, a core routing protocol of the Internet. While this vulnerability is well known among network security engineers, this incident will bring it to the attention of senior management of Fortune 500 organizations.
Is there anyone left on the planet by now who’s (a) in charge of a large chunk of address space, (b) not monitoring the BGP routing of that space, and (c) not petitioning their service providers to implement best common practices for route filtering?
