The Internet is flapping - could be nothing, could be something - The Great Awakening

The Internet is flapping - could be nothing, could be something 🔍 Votable

posted 2 years ago by tool 2 years ago by tool +246 / -0

Morning pedes,

I'm a sysadmin working for a small datacenter in Germany. Against 09:00 GMT we had calls from some of our customers, they were complaining about some service degradation: load times for websites slowed down, ssh connections got terminated, ftp traffic was slow.

Analyzing my systems led to no results, so I called my provider if there was an issue with our connection.

He said: "to make it short: the Internet is partially broken..." I said what? Yup, some issues with route announcements in the BGP routers around the world.

As I write this, he called me back to tell me the issue got solved. Some guy/group, whatever, was able to insert false route announcements at BGP level, this is insane.

Let's see what the day brings up, but this was pretty scary (well, for my customers and for my boss, for me it was pretty exciting). Eyes on.

Godspeed, frens

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– JonathanE 29 points 2 years ago +29 / -0

I am a BGP expert, and you're spot on :)

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– SiggotsMeAgain 9 points 2 years ago +9 / -0

Yep.

To expand, BGP controls the routing of data, i.e. the path.

It's like the postal service saying all mail for destination A must first come to sorting station B via central station C. But if you wanted that mail to go via different sorting/central stations you'd mess with BGP (in the IT sense).

Say you want all the mail for a particular destination to go through the sorting centre that you have all the inspectors at and that you control. That would be pretty powerful. That's what dodgy modifications to BGP are capable of, if done right.