December 27th, 2018

Memorandum of Understanding with ISOC

We are pleased to announce that Qrator Labs has signed Memorandum of Understanding with the Internet Society. The Internet Society is a global non-profit organization, trusted as the world’s independent source of leadership for Internet policy, technology standards, and availability of the Internet. It has a global membership base of more than 50,000 individual members and more than 200 branches and member organizations worldwide.

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November 26th, 2018

“No Filters” or An Easy Way to Shoot In the Foot

Several times in our posts we discussed consequences of lack of ingress filtering. Such mistake configuration can work fine most of the time, but one day may result in an outage at regional or even global scale. And yesterday, 25.11.2018, it happened again, this time in Russia.

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November 13th, 2018

Mistake, Mistake, Blackhole

Yesterday, on 12.11.2018 a BGP configuration mistake happened at Mainone Cable Company (AS37282), a Nigerian ISP. It mainly hit two content providers: Google (AS15169, AS36384, AS36492, AS43515) and Cloudflare (AS13335). Leaked routes were accepted by its direct upstream, China Telecom (AS4809), further advertised in Russia to TTK (AS20485) and finally learned by NTT (AS2914) in Europe. After reaching the Tier-1 providers level leaked prefixes propagated globally, redirecting traffic to unusual Europe-Russia-China-Nigeria route.

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August 23rd, 2018

National Internet Segments' Reliability

Qrator Labs is excited to present the 2018 National Internet Reliability Survey. In this report, we study how the outage of a single AS may affect the global connectivity of the region.

Internet connectivity at the interdomain level is based on connectivity between autonomous systems (AS’s). Test. As the number of alternate routes between AS’s increases, so goes the fault-resistance and stability of the internet in a given country. However, some paths prove to be more important than others.

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July 30th, 2018

Leaked Censorship

For the last 30 years basic idea behind the Internet’ design hasn’t changed - it connects people and services with each other. However, some authorities may have a different angle on what services their citizens should be able to connect to. A regulator might require ISPs to block off selected content or IP-address space for the end-users. How is that implemented? There are many options, but the most popular one is with the help of static routes, that may be propagated locally in BGP. Mistakes in this ‘local propagation’ have happened before: most notable was the YouTube hijack back in 2008, but less famous events were continually happening all over the decade. Today we observed another one, created by Iranian ISP that affected Telegram messenger.

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May 30th, 2018

Integration with RPKI and IRR Data

Dear colleagues, we are glad to inform you that our team has finished integration with IRR data sources and ROA records. It should significantly increase the quality of hijacks detection, plus improve transparency of what is happening to route objects in different registries.

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May 21st, 2018

The Day the Internet Survived

Recently, several severe routing incidents were spreading globally: hijack of the 5% of an entire IPv4 address space from Brazil, route leak between Russia and Asia through Kyrgyzstan, and at last, previous Friday there was an event that could lead to an outage of a significant part of all the BGP ecosystem. Fortunately, it didn’t happen.

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April 26th, 2018

BGP hijacks - Malicious or Mistakes?

A few days ago several cybersecurity resources reported details of an entirely malicious traffic redirection that combined DNS, and BGP hijacking. The primary goal of this attack was to steal money from different cryptocurrency wallets and services. Moreover, it was successful, since Amazon did not detect it in time. Today, on April 26, another significant incident happened that seems to be also unnoticed by the majority of players.

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April 11th, 2018

Cisco SMI Vulnerability And Beyond

The situation we observed last week was both peculiar and strange when panic for Cisco Smart Install Protocol remote code execution vulnerability (cisco-sa-20160323-smi) started circling. There was confirmed botnet activity that was wiping configuration files exploiting this vulnerability and leaving a message “Don’t mess with our elections.” Moreover, there were rumors that significant amount of ISPs and even Internet segments get down due to this malicious actions.

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March 6th, 2018

Memcached Amplification

Last week there were several notable network incidents, which were the result of a new method for DDoS attacks amplification, using memcached database. Several DDoS mitigation providers, including Qrator Labs and Akamai, have confirmed that they were hit by this new attack kind. The new type of DDoS attack was able to break the record and reach 1.3 Tbps bandwidth. As a reaction to this new threat, Qrator.Radar team has added detection of the open-to-world memcached database in our daily scan.

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January 25th, 2018

Measurement as the key to transparency

If you are looking for services such as IP-transit, MPLS channels or DDoS mitigation you can choose from a variety of products. However, it is difficult to compare offers and companies regarding actual service quality. Some organizations compare market offers, but often they look at the market share or the company’s financial condition and other business metrics that are not necessarily relevant to the quality of a service per se. Also, most of these comparisons are not available free of charge.

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January 17th, 2018

Moscow Traffic Jam

Moscow is famous for the traffic jams, with the governments continually fighting that particular problem. Nevertheless, the beginning of 2018 was marked with the new traffic bottleneck created with the help of BGP misdirection. At 12:01 UTC 17.01.2018, AS8901 belonging to Moscow City Government started leaking prefixes between its upstreams: the Rostelecom (AS12389) and Comcor (AS8732). Redirection peaked at 70000 affected prefixes.

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