CommentLast week, an internet routing screw-up propagated by Verizon for three hours sparked havoc online, leading to significant press attention and industry calls for greater network security. A few weeks before that, another packet routing blunder, this time pushed by China Telecom, lasted two hours, caused significant disruption …

UpdatedVerizon sent a big chunk of the internet down a black hole this morning – and caused outages at Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others – after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA. For nearly three hours, web traffic that was supposed to go to some of the biggest names online …

CommentYet another large interweb routing blunder has prompted internet engineers to stress the need for additional security at the network's foundational layer, and again raised eyebrows at the behavior of China Telecom. On June 6, more than 70,000 BGP routes were leaked from Swiss colocation company Safe Host to China Telecom in …

Australia's home affairs minister Peter Dutton wants the parliamentary inquiry into his proposed crypto-busting law to wind up its work, and send the draft rules back to legislators to approve, stat. This is the law that will let Aussie cops and intelligence agents pressure communication service providers into coughing up …

UpdatedMonday's prolonged Google cloud and websites outage was triggered by a botched network update by a West Africa telco, it is claimed. Main One, a biz ISP based in Lagos, Nigeria, that operates a submarine cable between Portugal and South Africa, said a misconfiguration at its end caused Google-bound traffic to be redirected to …

Oracle has backed claims that China Telecom Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements regularly take internet traffic on an unwanted tour of the Middle Kingdom. At the end of October, a paper by Chris Demchak of the US Naval War College and Yuval Shavit from Tel Aviv University documented what the pair said were "unusual and …

Juniper Networks this week pulled the covers off the latest in its Contrail range, a carrier edge product called Contrail Edge Cloud. The Gin Palace said the software targets applications like base stations, hub sites, and switching sites. Integration with Red Hat's OpenStack IaaS platform allows Contrail Edge Cloud to run …

A proposal for securing BGP – the protocol that lays out the traffic pathways of the internet – has a another backer: NIST, aka America's National Institute for Standards and Technology. The US government agency has issued a discussion paper outlining the use of Route Origin Validation (ROV) to protect the notoriously all-too- …

India's ISPs have agreed as a bloc to join The Internet Society's MANRS route integrity programme. MANRS stands for Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security, and was launched in 2014 to try and solve some of the Border Gateway Protocol's most pressing problems. In essence, the programme asks its members to play their part in …

UpdatedA bunch of Telegram messages went the long way round on Monday: a BGP leak sent people's Telegram chat communications via systems in Iran. Flagged by OpenDNS's BGPMon as a possible BGP hijack, the cockup could also have been a simple case of a sysadmin typo, since the redirection of packets only lasted two hours and fifteen …

A year-long effort to stop an accused “bad actor” who hijacked border gateway protocol (BGP) routes has borne fruit, with giant Hurricane Electric and Portugal's IPTelecom joining in cutting off an organisation called Bitcanal. Dyn detailed the process, which is nearing completion a year after German Internet exchange DE-CIX …

The Internet's fundamental routing infrastructure, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is so fragile that errors in one to four per cent of ISP route filters can propagate bad routes. So says Czech DDOS-defender Qrator Labs, which carried out a project to try and help the Internet community quantify how much of the threat to …

Eighteen months after acquiring Internet infrastructure outfit Dyn, Oracle has unveiled some of the smarts it bought in the form of an "Internet Intelligence Map". Explaining the launch, Oracle's Director of Internet Analysis Doug Madory wrote “a self-serve capability for some of the insights we produce is a great way to move …

Playing Battleships over the Border Gateway Protocol probably wasn't a scenario considered by the standard's authors, but UK blogger Ben "Jojo" Cox has explained how to do it. Cox's tutorial is part amusement, part warning, because while explaining the protocol (and why it's hard to fix), he pointed out that in the 32 bits …

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of the Internet's basic pieces of plumbing technologies, but it's also so old it was designed before the security needs of a multi-billion-user network were understood. In particular, BGP is notorious for allowing sysadmins to “black-hole” huge swathes of traffic either by fat-fingering …

Cisco's pushed a fix for a border gateway protocol (BGP) denial-of-service bug in its IOS XE operating system. Between a couple of releases of IOS, the company says it introduced a bug to its RFC 7432 implementation, which gives the system support for MPLS-based Ethernet VPNs. As a result, as Cisco's advisory explains, a …

Last Friday, someone in Google fat-thumbed a border gateway protocol (BGP) advertisement and sent Japanese Internet traffic into a black hole. The trouble began when The Chocolate Factory “leaked” a big route table to Verizon, the result of which was traffic from Japanese giants like NTT and KDDI was sent to Google on the …

One of the most persistent bugs in internet infrastructure, route leaks in the border gateway protocol (BGP), is in the sights of a group of 'net boffins with their new Internet-Draft. BGP's one of the internet's persistent trouble-spots: ineradicable because it's ubiquitous, it's vulnerable because it's ancient, a relic of a …