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Route-Injection Attacks Detouring Internet Traffic
msm1267 writes "Attackers are using route injection attacks against BGP-speaking routers to insert additional hops in the traffic stream, redirecting traffic to third-party locations where it can be inspected before it's sent to its destination. Internet intelligence company Renesys has detected close to 1,500 IP address blocks that have been hijacked on more than 60 days this year, a disturbing trend that indicates attackers could finally have an increased interest in weaknesses inherent in core Internet infrastructure."
As a "serious network admin", most groups have little control over the critically necessary BGP handling of their upstream nework provider. Ones is't left your building, it takes considerable extra steps to track and verify the packets to ascertain the packets are being routed outside your upstream venror, or their colleague's, control. By the time you can get the evidence passed along to any party in any of those companies that can actually do anything about the problem, the attack is often already over, if not simply better concealed.
Unfortunately, BGP has been a necessary evil to _balance_ traffic in a dynamic network. It's also unfortunate that it is often deliberately manipulated, as a matter of corporate strategy, to avoid expensive but faster routes, or to manipulate competitor's traffic reports. The amount of business based manipulation of what was designed as a metric based feedback and tuning system means that it will not ever be used for "honest" routing. I'm afraid that any plan to sanitize the BGP tables will run afoul of business needs and wind up rejected.
You'll be surprised. There are diamonds in the shit. Many knowledgeable people frequent this site, but many are repulsed from making a new thread. They jump on a good ones though.
So this is what stories are: Early threads of jokes by people that don't read the article or summary; Followed by people that read the summary then read relevant Wikipedia article; Finally by people that read the article. Somewhere in the last two categories, insightful or interesting thread will be made and the worthwhile comments will come.
Of course that won't happen if the good posters take up your attitude and just give up. So if you know something about the subject in the article, don't be shy and make a thread explaining the matter in your own words or make examples. Worst case scenario is that you get joke/grammar nazi responses or get down modded. The former doesn't matter as time goes on you will get insightful resposes after a while. As for the latter: Don't get discouraged. There are lots of us that read at -1.
As the case here :-)