February 24th, 2008
Pakistan takes out YouTube
Like I said in a recent post, the Internet is a series of tubes. Sometimes that helps route around malicious legislation and regulators, sometimes it causes big problems. Like today at 2 PM eastern when someone in Pakistan announced a more specific BGP route announcement for the block of IP addresses that YouTube uses. Routers default to the more specific route announcement. Now all YouTube traffic is being routed to Pakistan.
Our trusting routers are the BIGGEST security hole. Malicious attackers can easily disrupt the entire Internet by betraying that trust.
Thanks to Barrett Lyon at Bitgravity for tracking this.
Update: Stiennon’s blog has moved to here.
Richard Stiennon is an industry consultant. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
