Internet traffic for Google, Facebook, Apple was briefly rerouted to Russia

https://bgpmon.net/popular-destinations-rerouted-to-russia/

by couchand • 9 years ago

333 106 9 years ago

lexxed• 9 years ago

Isn't that what https is for ? So no one can read the traffic ?

rblatz2• 9 years ago

Assuming that state level actors don’t have ways to get around https? I’d expect a nation like Russia could acquire or procure new key for the targeted domains or perform some unknown 0 day attack on the targeted companies to acquire the original key.

nothrabannosir• 9 years ago

Not with certificate pinning , which google certainly has, and I’d be surprised if the other two didn’t. It is an issue for smaller sites (which might have been the real target)

zaarn• 9 years ago

Even with encrypted traffic, an attacker can learn things, especially if you get DNS and SNI data

I suspect (but cannot prove) that this might have been a leak from Russia's internal internet into the wider global net. Since Russia isn't well known for it's privacy respecting nature, it might have been a traffic scanner to see if people are being good citizens. However, that is just speculation and I hope it's wrong.

cwilkes• 9 years ago

Yep, all you need to know is the IP addresses of certain domains (say Facebook) and then look for user IP transferring a lot of data to it meaning they are probably uploading a photo. Now tie that IP to an ISP and maybe a user and you can find out who might be posting derogatory memes about Putin.

otabdeveloper1• 9 years ago

Since Russia isn't well known for it's privacy respecting nature, it might have been a traffic scanner to see if people are being good citizens.

Yes, indeed! Guilty until proven guilty! Keep up the upstanding attitude, good citizen!

kkarp• 9 years ago

China did the same but for bigger scale in the past. The reason to do this is to store all traffic for future analysis. Now it is protected by https but there is no protocol or cryptography which couldn't be exploited in the future.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/how-c...

jcoffland• 9 years ago

Isn't forward secrecy helpful in protecting against exactly this kind of thing?

xfs• 9 years ago

Google themselves have done the same thing https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/27/google_routing_blun....

But as we all know, NSA does store all traffic for future analysis. A BGP leak from China or Russia, be that as it may, almost surely has nothing to do with storing traffic.

Bainos• 9 years ago

Performing a DNS hijack has more uses than just reading the traffic. It gives you information on the amount of data that is sent towards a given prefix (among other uses, this can help for creating DDoS attacks later). It also makes those prefixes unavailable for as long as the attack persists, which is already a form of denial of service.

riffic2• 9 years ago

The open trusting nature of BGP is kind of problematic isn’t it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking

iDemonix3• 9 years ago

I work for a medium sized ISP, we have about 500 peers over exchanges like LONAP and Linx. You'd be surprised how many of our peers won't use MD5 passwords or even filter properly.

riffic2• 9 years ago

Name and shame?

pas2• 9 years ago

They propagate a few prefixes toward you, right?

So you have to filter what you accept from them, no?

What mechanisms do you have for this?

If it's a lookup, why it's not feasible for higher Tier ISPs?

jlgaddis2• 9 years ago

Yes, and, to be fair, it's been a known problem for years. There are some potential solutions in the works but you can't just pick an arbitrary day and flip a switch and turn it on.

Most of these incidents are accidental and could easily be prevented. The network operator community can't even get everyone to implement BCP38, though, so something like a full Internet-wide RPKI is a pipe dream. Even basic filtering would prevent much of this but that's apparently asking too much as well.

The amount of filtering, if any, varies tremendously from network to network. Some won't accept routes without IRR entries, LOAs, and a bunch of paperwork. Others (such as AS31133, apparently) will accept any prefix you want and as many of 'em as you want.

I'll give (some of) the Tier 1's a bit of a break, as filtering on every single BGP session just isn't feasible (although some of them wouldn't bother filtering even if they could!). Pretty much everyone else should be filtering.

But they aren't. And they won't be any time soon. And so we'll continue to have incidents like this for the foreseeable future.

pas2• 9 years ago

Why can't higher Tier ISPs require that each prefix they get from downstream must be recorded in some DB and do the lookup before [propagating the prefix and] installing the forwarding table entries?

maltalex10• 9 years ago

Yes, but to be honest, it's not just BGP. One of the things that BGPMon won't tell you about since they're in the business of monitoring BGP is that the same attack is often performed by changing forwarding tables i.e. in network's data plane.

An attacker compromises a router (there are known vulnerabilities and back-doors) or gains leverage over a technician authorized to configure routers in some network. The attacker then manually changes the router's local routing table to forward packets to specific destinations through a different path. In such cases, the BGP path and announcements look absolutely fine and you'd need to look at the actual path at the data plane level to detect that something is wrong.

This is often done in big exchange points where many networks interconnect. These are places in which routers from major western countries can sit basically side-by-side with routers from Russia and China.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy by the way, I work for a company that monitors these kinds of attacks for a living.

skj• 9 years ago

This isn't a paranoid fantasy by the way, I work for a company that monitors these kinds of attacks for a living.

Then you'll certainly be familiar with some citation or documentation of evidence? I'm curious to see some.

gtrubetskoy4• 9 years ago

These are places in which routers from major western countries can sit basically side-by-side with routers from Russia and China.

Are you saying that Russia and China should be worried?

emmelaich• 9 years ago

If this is not a reason to punish (blackhole?) that AS I don't know what is.

maltalex10• 9 years ago

Sure, it's a reason to blackhole the isp, but this is the Internet we're talking about. So say its upstream providers will backhole it, say even the tier 1 providers do the same.

That won't stop it from connecting to smaller networks and announcing the same fake routes there. And even if the small networks blackhole it, the attackers can just register a new AS.

Also, there are cases in which attackers are performed from large networks, with millions of users. Are you going to blackhole such a network? They'll apologize and claim that it was a configuration error.

Note that these types of attacks are generally not performed by amateurs. They're performed by states, intelligence agencies, criminal organizations and the like.

yeukhon• 9 years ago

Is it fair to say BGP in general relies on “good will” trust model? I wonder if there exists an authoritative mechanism similar to browser punishing rouge or incompetent CA. I supposed the integrity and the authentication is achieved by implementing and deploying RPKI, but what about punishment?

maltalex10• 9 years ago

Is it fair to say BGP in general relies on “good will” trust model?

Yes.

I wonder if there exists an authoritative mechanism similar to browser punishing rouge or incompetent CA

Not really. Although if you get a reputation for being notoriously problematic, the "big boys" - the large networks who are the responsible adults in this game might deny you service or stop accepting your announcements.

I supposed the integrity and the authentication is achieved by implementing and deploying RPKI

RPKI doesn't really solve the issue. It validates only the initial announcer, so BGP hijacks can still occur. It would however help reduce hijacks due to mistakes in configuration.

bandrami2• 9 years ago

It's better than it used to be. Back in the mid-90s I was a newly-minted network engineer working in my first datacenter and we were all very excited about this new "BGP" technology...

Fifteen minutes later, half of Fairfax County is stuck in a routing loop, and we're getting calls from NOCs as far away as London asking us what the f* we're doing to their traffic.

That was the wild west: back then, a typo could (and sometimes did) actually take down The Internet. There's more filtering and checking and second-guessing today. But, ultimately, it's based on a web of trust model, you're right, with all the weaknesses that come with that.

partycoder• 9 years ago

In 1998, a hacker collective known as the L0pht testified in Congress that they could take down the Internet in 30 minutes.

It is believed BGP black holes could be one way of achieving this.

Basically tell every node "I've got the lowest routing cost to every node, send me all your traffic", and then drop all the traffic.

aaomidi• 9 years ago

This is much better nowadays but bgp is still problematic.

maltalex10• 9 years ago

It's not really better today. Possibly even worse.

In 1998 there were fewer than 5000 different networks (Autonomous systems) on the Internet. Today that number is over 80K. Network operators used to personally know each other and their clients.

So the automatic filtering is better today than it was in 1998, but it can still be easily bypassed.

I know for a fact that even as a tiny network, all you need to do to get the some of the biggest networks in the world to accept your (real or fake) BGP announcement is to email their support center.

manugarri• 9 years ago

hopefully Comcast and AT&T will fix this soon

alex_g• 9 years ago

What is a prefix (in context), and what does it mean to ‘announce’ one?

iDemonix3• 9 years ago

In BGP you have sets of IP destinations, which you summarise as a prefix. Announcing or advertising means exactly what it sounds like, you announce to your peers that you have paths to these networks.

jlgaddis2• 9 years ago

A prefix is an IP subnet, basically.

Most here are familiar with Google's public DNS resolver, 8.8.8.8, so let's use that as an example.

Google has been assigned the autonomous system number (ASN) 15169. The 8.0.0.0/8 IP address space was allocated to Level3 and they have reallocated a small part of it, 8.8.8.0/24, to Google.

Google, when speaking to their BGP peers, "announces" routes, including an announcement for the 8.8.8.0/24 prefix.

An announcement is basically Google's router telling, for example, Level3's router, "Hey, I know how to get to 8.8.8.0/24. If you have traffic going there, you can send it to me."

Level3 then passes that along to other peers, like me. Level3 says, "If you have traffic for 8.8.8.0/24, you can send it to me and I'll send it on towards its origin". The announcements continue to be passed along to other peers.

A withdrawal is the opposite of an announcement: "Hey, I don't have a route to 8.8.8.0/24 anymore" or, in many cases, "the route to 8.8.8.0/24 has changed, here's the new one".

Here's a (slimmed down) example from one of my routers:

  # sh ip bgp 8.8.8.0/24 | b 3356
    3356 15169, (received & used)
      4.69.248.15 from 4.69.248.15 (4.69.180.167)
        Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, external, best
        Community: 3356:3 3356:86 3356:575 3356:666 3356:2042

This shows the "AS path" (the path through the various ASNs back to the origin), "3356 15169". AS3356 is Level3. We can see that AS15169 (Google) originated the prefix (8.8.8.0/24), and announced it to their BGP peer, Level3. Level3 then passed that announcement along to my router.

Here's the same thing for 66.232.224.0/24, mentioned in the article:

  # sh ip bgp 66.232.224.0/24
  BGP routing table entry for 66.232.224.0/24, version 1125190207
  Paths: (1 available, best #1, table Default-IP-Routing-Table)
    Advertised to update-groups:
          4
    3356 209 40839, (received & used)
      4.69.248.15 from 4.69.248.15 (4.69.180.167)
        Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, external, best
        Community: 209:209 209:13070 3356:3 3356:22 3356:86 3356:575 3356:666 3356:2042

The AS path here is "3356 209 40839" which shows that traffic from me to 66.232.224.0/24 will first go to Level3 (AS3356), then to Qwest/CenturyLink (AS209), and finally to AS40839 (Kohl's Department Stores).

With regard to the hijack described in the article, this means that another organization announced the prefixes into BGP, effectively saying, "So, all of that traffic you have that's going to Apple/Facebook/Google/etc., just go ahead and start sending that to AS39523 now". Instead of ending up at Apple/Facebook/Google, it'll instead be redirected to this unknown organization in Russia.

(N.B.: Before anyone chimes in to "correct" something, this is a bit simplified. There's much more to BGP than this and there are a number of different factors which determine which route is chosen. A longer prefix -- mentioned in the article -- is one way to "defeat" a better route.)

digi_owl• 9 years ago

One curious thing about 8.8.8.8 (and 8.8.4.4) is that it gets redirected to the closest Google CDN.

Grimm665• 9 years ago

Thanks for this explanation.

dredmorbius4• 9 years ago

Sometimes it's slightly simpler to show rather than tell.

The CIDR Report is a publicly accessible compendium of BGP routing announcements. Mind that this isn't the entire Internet, or even entirely current, though it's a very large and generally current version of it. One of the complications is that you're only seeing the routes the CIDR Report itself is aware of (there may be others, though generally those will be small/obscure).

But if you want to know what "the Internet" is, this is pretty much it: a bunch of rules for routing data.

http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/

As for BGP, Border Gateway Protocol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol

The routes advertised by the AS (autonomous system) in question, AS39523:

http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS39523&view...

(There are a maximum of 2^16 == 65,536 autonomous systems possible under BGP, at least until those counters are extended. What happens under IPv6 may be a bit of a mess....)

Edit: There's 4 billion and change as ASNs are now 32 bit, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15915417

codedokode2• 9 years ago

This is not the first time when BGP is misused this way. I think governments should regularly perform live tests to check whether their countries' AS's can be hijacked.

holyavengerone• 9 years ago

Basic security. Like how everyone failed at keeping Equifax in check.

topranks6• 9 years ago

All AS's can be hijacked. Your suggestion is meaningless.

maltalex10• 9 years ago

I think governments should regularly perform live tests to check whether their countries' AS's can be hijacked.

That's a waste of money and effort. They should just write "yes" on a piece of paper, there's really no reason to check.

baybal2• 9 years ago

That AS was registered to dv-hyperlink.ru which is not in whois database

Looks suspicious. How did they register an AS to a non-existing company to begin with?

topranks6• 9 years ago

It was assigned by RIPE to "Vasilyev Ivan Ivanovich, 8 Pionerskaya st., office 10, Nekrasovka, Khabarovsk region Russia".

ALFA TELECOM s.r.o., in the Czech Republic seem to have acted as sponsoring LIR for the allocation.

RIPE rules require that the sponsoring LIR submit documents to them showing the legal standing of the organisation that will use the resources. So in theory that should have happened here.

vectorEQ• 9 years ago

'normally' it gets routed to US (even if they have servers elsewhere to handle same shit...), which for most countries is actually more worrying...

futurix• 9 years ago

If you believe that Russia is less worrying than US, then... err... I don't believe you exist actually.

pixl973• 9 years ago

Well, if you are a security researcher, Russia is less apt to redirect your flight mid ocean and arrest you in a country you weren't even going to. So I guess the US just might be more worrying to particular people based upon their occupation.

LaGrange• 9 years ago

For all their posturing, Russia just lacks the means to be as dangerous as the US is.

baxtr• 9 years ago

Could someone explain in laymen terms what happened and what that means?

topranks6• 9 years ago

The internet works by organisations "announcing" the IP ranges they're allocated to other networks (ISPs, other large companies etc.) Networks that receive an announcement will route traffic for those IP ranges to the network that announced them.

The protocol by which this is done is called BGP. The original version of this was created in 1989 and back then everyone involved trusted each other. So there is no security built in to prevent a rogue company announcing addresses they don't own, and therefore pulling in traffic people send to those addresses.

Organisations can and do put filters in place to try and stop this, but because it's not a core baked in feature of BGP not everyone does, and issues can happen.

Sometimes these things are just mistakes engineers make, re-announcing routes they've learnt elsewhere. Sometimes they are deliberate hi-jacks.

ag_47• 9 years ago

Basically, a router somewhere in Russia claimed to be the owner of some ip addresses belonging to Google, Facebook, etc. Other neighbouring routers began forwarding packets from actual users to this router. The packets contain the HTTPS requests people were making to these sites.

VVayneTracker• 9 years ago

Bit late to the party but what could be done with the information that they got their hands on?

GCU-Empiricist• 9 years ago

Internet traffic goes through whatever path will get it to it's destination fastest. Big Routers advertise to each other how long it will take to get somewhere through them. There have been times when either due to bugs, or due to a desire to slurp traffic, some machines have falsely advertised shorter routes causing traffic to pas through routes traffic wouldn't normally pass through. This time it was somewhere in Russia. This can be mitigated like most malicious acts / network errors if you write clever enough rules, but is hard because you have to identify the bad actors, or paths that lead to them.

maltalex10• 9 years ago

but is hard because you have to identify the bad actors, or paths that lead to them.

It's worse than that. There are few truly "bad actors". Many BGP hijacks are performed by completely legitimate networks, which later claim that it was a configuration issue.

euske• 9 years ago

Someone should make a blockchain-based routing system.

paulie_a• 9 years ago

And a new ICO is born

cat199• 9 years ago

It's called UUCP.

Transactions take 3-5 days to process, are sometimes lost, but hey, it's the next great thing, so worth every expensive penny.

gtrubetskoy4• 9 years ago

This is a well known "feature" (because it is not a bug) of BGP and every ISP worth their salt ought to be doing route filtering to prevent this sort of thing. If they're not, then the traffic can be diverted to Russia or the proverbial bit bucket rather trivially.

I understand that less network savvy readers think this story is about Russia, but it really is about ISP's and the old issue of lazy network admins who do not filter routes and what happens. You can replace "Russia" with "Canada" and it wouldn't change the meaning. The country attribution is based on the AS (Autonomous System) registration. If these were really the malicious state actors, they'd probably use an AS registered in another country to cover their tracks. This is either an honest mistake or possibly a "let's see what would happen" prank.

INTPenis• 9 years ago

I just have to ask, not knowing how to setup BGP but having a lot of experience with PF and ipfw; is it not possible to create a sort of default deny filter so you only exclude the routes you have?

The way your post read it sounded like you had to create a filter for all routes in the world but I assume that's not the case in the practical sense.

gtrubetskoy4• 9 years ago

You only need to create filters for the routes you know, e.g. if you are an ISP providing internet connectivity for company X, then you know that the only advertisement from the link to X can be for X and if the link to company X advertises routes from Google, Facebook or Apple AS's, then that's bogus.

It's just tedious to do this, and a lot of providers, especially smaller ones don't bother with it.

fosco• 9 years ago

creating a list of 'expected' receive routes and expected 'send' routes is fairly easy to create. aka outbound and inbound prefix lists, I quickly googled and found the following config [0] that shows them 'advertising' their owned networks to prevent advertising networks they should not be and also accepting other networks they expect. this prevents and would have mitigated this sort of situation if implemented everywhere.

no I do not believe this to be difficult and anyone configuring BGP should have some awareness of most of its tools.

you can live your whole life without having to use a fire extinguisher or understanding the differences between a,b,c,d etc types but if you are a fire (man/woman) I expect you to understand which is used in what circumstance. if you do not you have the chance to spread a fire and make it worse then prevent it the same with someone who calls themself a network engineer.

[0] https://supportforums.cisco.com/legacyfs/online/legacy/0/5/4...

OldSchoolJohnny• 9 years ago

I understand ISP's are to blame here, but how is it not about Russia, the article specifically states that only certain entities were targeted in a suspicious manner. Seems like nefarious purposes at work here no?

topranks6• 9 years ago

Yes.

The particular networks announced, and particularly the fact that more specific routes were announced, suggests this is some nefarious incident. Not just an accident that someone announced routes they shouldn't have.

vlan0• 9 years ago

I understand ISP's are to blame here, but how is it not about Russia, the article specifically states that only certain entities were targeted in a suspicious manner. Seems like nefarious purposes at work here no?

Sure there are. But compare this to an organization getting owned because they didn't patch a known vulnerability. We generally focus on the company that was breached because the power to stop such a breach was in their hands. The same can be said in this situation. ISPs are not proactively taking known measures to minimize the impact of a BGP hijack.

Malicious actors will be malicious...it's what they do. If it's not Russia, it'll be someone else.

gtrubetskoy4• 9 years ago

how is it not about Russia

It could be, the key missing piece of information is the physical location of the actual router that is the ultimate source of this. It is only known by their peers or upstream and is not easily traceable (in the US it's usually under NDA and you'd need court order to find out "officially"). Some network admin somewhere probably knows. May be he/she reads HN. The second question is whether that device is hacked and is doing it unbeknown to its admin.

But without this information, the fact that this is an AS registered with a bogus .ru domain doesn't mean anything, this could be coming from Liechtenstein or Bolivia.

topranks6• 9 years ago

It's unfair to say it's a "feature". It was an oversight back in 1989 based on nobody expecting we'd end up where we are today.

Filtering is easy if your just doing it for downstream customers.

But how do Tier 1's filter from each other? Once you go up the tree a few times it gets really hard to build any sort of valid filter list of what you should be getting from provider X or provider Y.

BGPSEC and RPKI are unfortunately not really workable yet, in terms of full-path validation. And obviously the source data to do it is a long way off.

bandrami2• 9 years ago

I've often said it's just as well that the public doesn't understand how BGP actually works.

maltalex10• 9 years ago

It's not just the public, it's professionals too.

There are probably more brain surgeons on earth than people who understand how BGP works.

bawana• 9 years ago

basically, a more specific routing address is used to direct packets through a specific route. In the earlier instance( the second example) Japan was the target. It is easy to see how the routing system in japan could have been crashed through such an overload (basically a ddos). Who would do that to Japan? China? Korea?

In the more recent instance, all the traffic from google, facebook, apple, and other major players was routed through russia. Is this china making russia look evil? after all, if the traffic is going through russia, all russia has to do is turn off the power for that router to momentarily stop all traffic.

or is this the NSA trying to #uck w russia and at the same time trying to create an incident so the fcc kills net neutrality to provide 'security'.

This is state of the art espionage

ryanmarsh• 9 years ago

I always wonder how Russian people, either Russian Americans or Russian citizens, feel about all this Russia hysteria.

nasredin2• 9 years ago

Putin's approval rating is in the 80s.

That should be enough to tell you what they think of you without looking at polls.

(IIRC they were trying to shut down the one independent poll firm recently)

Internet traffic for Google, Facebook, Apple was briefly rerouted to Russia

Related Stories