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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.
We really need to figure out a way to secure BGP announcements.
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.
The way that it works in BGP-Land is that once you are designated an "Autonomous System" and assigned a AS number (kinda like having an SS7 ID in telecom land), you can update all of the other BGP routers around the world. It's the only way for the internet to function today. Not that it doesn't need additional security, but....
First, the answer to OP's question is no, China Telecom has no stake in Main One. Second, your statement about indebted nations makes no sense, Nigeria has a very, very low debt-to-GDP ratio, they haven't been an "indebted nation" since the late 1980s. Read up a little before replying about something you know nothing about.
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.