By
Steven Wallace - Director, Internet2 Routing Integrity
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
On Monday, March 28, the Russian ISP RTCOMM began blocking Twitter from their users. Due to a misconfiguration, for a period of 45-minutes, their routing leak had the ripple effect of attempting to hijack Twitter from the entire global internet. Fortunately, the hijack didn’t work.
In 2008 the same pattern played out when Pakistan Telecom accidentally hijacked YouTube. They were also trying to prevent Pakistan users from watching YouTube and accidentally hijacked it globally. Unfortunately, the hijack was successful, and YouTube was globally disrupted.
Internet2 can help! We have been working with the community to enhance our collective Routing Integrity with tools such as RPKI ROAs.
To learn more about RPKI ROAs and how they can protect your network, send us an email at manrs@internet2.edu. |
Why was Twitter successful in fighting off the hijack while YouTube wasn’t? Twitter succeeded because today much of the commercial internet use free and easy-to-implement routing protection called Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Route Origination Authorizations (ROAs).
The U.S. research and education (R&E) community’s use of RPKI ROAs is currently about one-fifth the rate of global internet adoption. What are you doing to be proactive? Do you have a plan to use RPKI ROAs to protect your resources against similar outages?
ICYMI
About the Author(s)
Steve Wallace promotes the adoption and improvement of routing security and integrity throughout the Internet2 community. He has been an active community member for over 24 years, having started as the engineer responsible for the team that built Abilene, Internet2's first network.