June 25th, 2019

How difficult is it to disrupt a service nowadays?

Today we often talk about SLA and redundancy. And the increasing role of clouds in the overall Internet infrastructure. Someone says that they will play a crucial role in traffic share in the nearest future. However, there are other huge ISPs - Tier-1, aka the biggest transit operators, which have transnational cables and indeed are part of the historical Internet backbone. They often play the role of last resort in the filtration process of bad routes. Because they have hundreds of customers. Also, almost all of these customers believe in what they got from the provider ISPs. That is the main reason why modern internet drafts rely on Tier-1s as flag carriers and hope that they’ll apply a new security mechanism among all the others.
Is this always a real scenario? READ MORE →

May 7th, 2019

Legacy Outage

Two days ago, May 5 of the year 2019 we saw a peculiar BGP outage, affecting autonomous systems in the customer cone of one very specific AS with the number 721. READ MORE →

April 11th, 2019

Bad news, everyone! New hijack attack in the wild

On March 13, a proposal for the RIPE anti-abuse working group was submitted, stating that a BGP hijacking event should be treated as a policy violation. In case of acceptance, if you are an ISP attacked with the hijack, you could submit a special request where you might expose such an autonomous system. If there is enough confirming evidence for an expert group, then such a LIR would be considered an adverse party and further punished. There were some arguments against this proposal.

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April 8th, 2019

BGP perforating wound

It was an ordinary Wednesday on 4.04.2019. Except that at some point of the midday timeline an AS60280 belonging to Belarus’ NTEC leaked 18600 prefixes originating from approximately 1400 ASes. Those routes were taken from the transit provider RETN (AS9002) and further announced to NTEC’s provider - RU-telecom’s AS205540, which, in its turn, accepted all of them, spreading the leak.

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March 20th, 2019

Russian Internet Segment Architecture

As many of our readers know, Qrator.Radar is constantly researching global BGP connectivity, as well as regional. Since the Internet stands for “Interconnected Networks,” to ensure the best possible quality and speed the interconnectivity of individual networks should be rich and diverse, with their growth motivated on a sound competitive basis.

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March 4th, 2019

Eliminating opportunities for traffic hijacking

This week it has been 11 years since the memorable YouTube BGP incident, provoked by the global propagation of a more specific prefix announce, originated by the Pakistan Telecom, leading to an almost 2 hour in duration traffic disruption in the form of redirecting traffic from legitimate path to the bogus one. We could guess if that event was intentional, and even a correct answer wouldn’t help us completely prevent such incidents from happening today. While you read this, a route leak or a hijack is spreading over the networks. Why? Because BGP is not easy, and configuring a correct and secure setup is even harder (yet).

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January 23rd, 2019

Not an outage, but the shutdown

On the week starting January 13 news on Zimbabwe’ internet connection shutdown had been flooding over media. We are here not to discuss the roots of this situation but, instead, to look at the BGP and connectivity picture we have from Zimbabwe.

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