Over the weekend, the Pakistan Telecom Authority ordered
Pakistan's ISPs to block YouTube. The ISPs shared BGP (Border
gateway protocol) data, which advertised routes to nowhere for
YouTube.
But, the routes were "accidentally" shared with a
company in Hong Kong. Because the routes were very concise, and
because no one bothered to see if they were accurate, routers all over
accepted the routes as the best path to YouTube.
The following article gives more information, including the
suggestion that secure BGP be adopted.
http://www.macworld.com/article/132256/2008/02/networking.html
This article
http://www.9wsyr.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=3786d02a-34e5-4f04-ad93-ce3a039f3eed&rss=112
provides more information, including this quote:
"Misrouting occurs every
year or so among the world's Internet carriers, usually as a result of
typos or other errors, Underwood said. In a more severe example, a
Turkish telecom provider in 2004 started advertising that it was the
best route to all of the Internet, causing widespread outages for many
Web sites over several hours.
"Nobody ran any viruses or worms or malicious code. This is just
the way the Internet works. And it's not very secure or reliable,"
Underwood said, adding that there is no real solution to the problem
on the table.
While most route hijacking is unintentional, some Yahoo networks were
apparently taken over a few years ago to distribute spam.
"To be honest, there's
not a single thing preventing this from happening to E-Trade, or Bank
of America, or the FBI, or the White House, or the Clinton campaign,"
Underwood said. "I think it's a useful moment for people to
decide just how important it is that we fix problems like
this."
How stable is the Internet,
anyway? Perhaps ALAC would like to discuss.
Jean Armour Polly