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Mainframe Bloke [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Register reports a hack, speculated to be intentional instead of the usual finger fumble, whereby all of Google's traffic was routed for just over an hour to servers in Russia and China.

The Register story: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/13/google_russia_routing/. [theregister.co.uk]

It quotes this update from Google: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18018#18018002 [google.com]

Excerpt from the update:

"The issue with Google Cloud IP addresses being erroneously advertised by internet service providers other than Google has been resolved for all affected users as of 14:35 US/Pacific. Throughout the duration of this issue Google services were operating as expected and we believe the root cause of the issue was external to Google. We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence."

As BGP is "broken by design", i.e. assumes trust where there is no longer any, what is perhaps surprising is that it took so long to happen. Does not augur well.

So much for "the internet always routes around damage". Maybe "always" takes time to happen...

Exercise for the reader: is it possible to circumvent this effectively, and if so, how? Has my paranoia-meter misfired, and there's really nothing to worry about?

Original Submission