Incident or trial?
Is this really an incident, or are the Chinese simply trying out this technique to intercept communications?
Internet service providers in China briefly tainted network routing tables on Thursday, marking the second time in two weeks operators in that country have done so, IDG news reports. The bad networking information originated from IDC China Telecommunication and was soon retransmitted by China's state-owned China …
Once is an accident, twice is a practice run, the next time will be a massive identity theft or industrial espionage. Why is anything from inside China allowed to propagate out without manual intervention? And that applies to every other country as well. No foreign network should be treated as trusted.
Once is for practice, twice is for something we haven't heard of yet and may never discover. Secret services usually have a lot of things going all the time and this may have been a means to an end. Besides, 30.000+ affected networks is a pretty good smokescreen - noone is going to be able to figure out who was target and who was decoy.
I, for one, etc....
I got a call early morning Friday from our China office saying the UK hosted company website was down. Phoned hosting Co in a panic only to be told there was no problem their end. Only then did I check from home (still bleary eyed) and I couldn't see our site from the UK either!!!!!
8.45 am UK time it all got better. Hosting company are still in denial! thanks El Reg for giving me something to show the MD who had steam coming out of every orifice!
"a similar networking anomaly caused people in Chile to be redirected to Chinese networks, potentially blocking websites such as Facebook and YouTube, which are banned in that country."
Which country bans YouTube and Facebook, China or Chile? Sloppy writing or is my understanding of the Engrish?
Well, since I have friends in Chile, and they are accessing Facebook normally as far as I can tell, I'll assume you meant China there...
ISP are quite notorious for avoiding the sort of common sense configurations that would help prevent this sort of thing from happening. BGP has more filtering/security mechanisms that all other routing protocols combined.
If I've learned anything over the last 15 years, generally someone didn't do their job when this happens. The routers just blindly forward packets as they're configured to. Put the safeguards in place that already exist and these incidents would happen even more rarely than they do.