Posted by Martijn Grooten on Dec 14, 2017
Yesterday, a 'mysterious event' involving BGP, the Internet's border gateway protocol, led to the traffic to many popular websites being routed for around six minutes.
BGP hijacks – the Internet equivalent of changing traffic direction signs – are not very common but occur more often than one would expect for a technology that is so important for the Internet. The technique has been used in the past to steal freshly mined Bitcoin, as well as to send spam from different netblocks.
Mike Benjamin, who works in security at Level 3 Communications, spends a lot of his free time looking at BGP and BGP hijacks. At VB2016 in Denver last year, he gave a presentation on the subject. For this week's Throwback Thursday, we have uploaded the video of Mike's presentation to our YouTube channel.
