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Nigerian Firm Takes Blame For Routing Google Traffic Through China (reuters.com)
Earlier today, it was reported that Google suffered a brief outage on Monday that pushed some of its traffic through networks in Russia, China, and Nigeria. Soon after Google said it would conduct an investigation, Nigeria's Main One Cable Company fessed up to the incident. According to Reuters, the company says it "accidentally caused the problem during a network upgrade." From the report: Main One said in an email that it had caused a 74-minute glitch by misconfiguring a border gateway protocol filter used to route traffic across the internet. That resulted in some Google traffic being sent through Main One partner China Telecom, the West African firm said. Even though Main One said it was to blame, some security experts said the incident highlighted concerns about the potential for hackers to conduct espionage or disrupt communications by exploiting known vulnerabilities in the way traffic is routed over the internet. Main One, which describes itself as a leading provider of telecom and network services for businesses in West Africa, said that it had investigated the matter and implemented new processes to prevent it from happening again.
that prince said something bad would happen if I didn't help him cash in that inheritance
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"Please dear sir,
I am writing this to you because I am in need of your help. You see I have a vast fortune that I need expedited to your country. I am in the process of immigrating there but to avoid the taxes from your country I wish to transfer to you my fortune. Well wait! When I am successfully in your country I will of course need to take possession of that money, but of course you will be handsomely rewarded for this small trifle of your time! All I need you to do is to reroute your financial information through our servers here in Nigeria so that I can discreetly deposit the funds into your account. Trust me when I say there will be no interruption in any services you see from your end, and at the end of the day there will be a vast sum of money in your account. We have the most reliable service here in Nigeria so you can trust me when I say that your information is completely secure.
Please respond as soon as possible as time is of the utmost essence."
--Sent to a senior google engineer
Maybe its time for BGP (the protocol that is used by all these networks to talk to each other) to get some security so that people can't advertise routes for IP blocks they dont actually own.
Great idea, you should totally do that.
Tell all of the tier 1 networks not to advertise routes to your 'blocks' because they don't own them.