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How a Router's Missed Range Check Nearly Crashed the Internet
Barlaam writes "A bug by router vendor A (omitting a range check from a critical field in the configuration interface) tickled a bug from router vendor B (dropping BGP sessions when processing some ASPATH attributes with length very close to 256), causing a ripple effect that caused widespread global routing instability last week. The flaw lay dormant until one of vendor A's systems was deployed in an autonomous system whose ASN, modulo 256, was greater than 250. At that point, the Internet was one typo away from disaster. Other router vendors, who were not affected by the bug, happily propagated the trigger message to every vulnerable system on the planet in about 30 seconds. Few people appreciate how fragile and unsecured the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure really is — this is just the latest example." Vendor A, in this case, is a Latvian router vendor called MikroTik.
Reportedly all data was lost. And it was more than just the routers -- someone was clogging the tubes by running too many apps on their desktop.
We should be very thankful that the partial backup was found with some info from the Google Tube, however.
A lot of admins, especially after the alert went out over the NANOG list
This is very off topic... but that's the first time I ever heard of "North American Network Operators Group." It's strange that apparently by coincidence that the acronym is the same as the name of one of the four transcription factors that causes de-differentiation in IPS cells. The wiki page says the transcription factor gets its name from some scottish legend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanog
Like I said, off topic but I thought it was interesting...