3 ms·

I understand ISP's are to blame here, but how is it not about Russia, the article specifically states that only certain entities were targeted in a suspicious m

I understand ISP's are to blame here, but how is it not about Russia, the article specifically states that only certain entities were targeted in a suspicious manner. Seems like nefarious purposes at work here no?

topranks 9y ago
Yes. The particular networks announced, and particularly the fact that more specific routes were announced, suggests this is some nefarious incident. Not just an accident that someone announced routes they shouldn't have.
vlan0 9y ago
>I understand ISP's are to blame here, but how is it not about Russia, the article specifically states that only certain entities were targeted in a suspicious manner. Seems like nefarious purposes at work here no? Sure there are. But compare this to an organization getting owned because they didn't patch a known vulnerability. We generally focus on the company that was breached because the power to stop such a breach was in their hands. The same can be said in this situation. ISPs are not proactively taking known measures to minimize the impact of a BGP hijack. Malicious actors will be malicious...it's what they do. If it's not Russia, it'll be someone else.
gtrubetskoy 9y ago
> how is it not about Russia It could be, the key missing piece of information is the physical location of the actual router that is the ultimate source of this. It is only known by their peers or upstream and is not easily traceable (in the US it's usually under NDA and you'd need court order to find out "officially"). Some network admin somewhere probably knows. May be he/she reads HN. The second question is whether that device is hacked and is doing it unbeknown to its admin. But without this information, the fact that this is an AS registered with a bogus .ru domain doesn't mean anything, this could be coming from Liechtenstein or Bolivia.

3 ms·

I understand ISP's are to blame here, but how is it not about Russia, the article specifically states that only certain entities were targeted in a suspicious m

by OldSchoolJohnny 9y ago

topranks 9y ago
Yes. The particular networks announced, and particularly the fact that more specific routes were announced, suggests this is some nefarious incident. Not just an accident that someone announced routes they shouldn't have.
vlan0 9y ago
>I understand ISP's are to blame here, but how is it not about Russia, the article specifically states that only certain entities were targeted in a suspicious manner. Seems like nefarious purposes at work here no? Sure there are. But compare this to an organization getting owned because they didn't patch a known vulnerability. We generally focus on the company that was breached because the power to stop such a breach was in their hands. The same can be said in this situation. ISPs are not proactively taking known measures to minimize the impact of a BGP hijack. Malicious actors will be malicious...it's what they do. If it's not Russia, it'll be someone else.
gtrubetskoy 9y ago
> how is it not about Russia It could be, the key missing piece of information is the physical location of the actual router that is the ultimate source of this. It is only known by their peers or upstream and is not easily traceable (in the US it's usually under NDA and you'd need court order to find out "officially"). Some network admin somewhere probably knows. May be he/she reads HN. The second question is whether that device is hacked and is doing it unbeknown to its admin. But without this information, the fact that this is an AS registered with a bogus .ru domain doesn't mean anything, this could be coming from Liechtenstein or Bolivia.