
BGP mishap sends European mobile traffic through China Telecom for 2 hours - ficklepickle
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/bgp-mishap-sends-european-mobile-traffic-through-china-telecom-for-2-hours/
======
okket
See also discussion from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20123720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20123720)
(35 comments)

Also, please: "Operators, where are your MANRS?"

[https://www.manrs.org/](https://www.manrs.org/)

------
tptacek
Most of the comments on both threads about this story center on whether this
is malicious activity by China Telecom on behalf of the PRC. My sense is those
commenters perhaps haven't read the actual story closely.

What happened here is that a small Swiss provider, Safe Host, accidentally
advertised routes it shouldn't have (those routes may also have been AS-
padded, as a safeguard to make them less attractive as primary routes). China
Telecom mistakenly propagated those routes, and in doing so became the
preferred path for a bunch of prefixes.

There appear to have been two mistakes here. China Telecom's was in
propagating the Safe Host advertisements, but the crucial mistake happened at
Safe Host in Switzerland, by leaking those routes in the first place.

I understand the impulse to want to live on an exciting cyberpunk Internet
where major governments are constantly manipulating BGP4 to capture WhatsApp
traffic or whatever, but these "mistakes" are almost always just _mistakes_.
It doesn't help that BGP4 itself is a clownfire of mistakes duct-taped
together with other mistakes: significant chunks of global Internet routing
policy are bound up in regular expressions.

~~~
WhitneyLand
>I understand the impulse to want to live on an exciting cyberpunk Internet

I don't think you do. On the contrary many people have no such impulse and in
fact never wanted or expected such scenarios to be a realistic concern.

It's scary. Undo this story and take back your cyber punks, please. Just the
possibility it was malicious, snd that's not necessarily an indictment of
China alone in the post Snowden era, is reason to seep up BGP improvements.

------
cronix
How many "mishaps" does it take until it becomes "willful???"

~~~
yorwba
What possible motivation could that Swiss hosting company have to
intentionally mess up their BGP configuration?

~~~
notacoward
Why do you assume they messed it up themselves?

~~~
rando444
This incident is old now, it is acknowledged that this was a mistake made by
the telecom itself.

~~~
manicdee
“If you worry you are getting too paranoid, you are not paranoid enough” — old
Internet security proverb.

------
egberts
Mishap? Yeah, right.

~~~
notacoward
My thoughts exactly. Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is
enemy action. And this kind of $#@! has happened way more than three times.

~~~
esoterica
I've forgotten my headphones at home more than three times, clearly enemy
action.

