Hacking

BGP hijacking – Traffic for Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and other tech giants routed through Russia

Traffic for Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and other tech giants routed through Russia, experts believe it was an intentional BGP Hijacking.

Last week a suspicious event routed traffic for major tech companies (i.e. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) through a previously unknown Russian Internet provider. The event occurred on Wednesday, researchers who investigated it believe the traffic was intentionally hijacked.

The incident involved the Internet’s Border Gateway Protocol that is used to route traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networks.

A similar incident occurred eight months when a huge amount of traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services was briefly routed through a telecom operator controlled by the Russian Government.

“Early this morning (UTC) our systems detected a suspicious event where many prefixes for high profile destinations were being announced by an unused Russian Autonomous System.  Starting at 04:43 (UTC) 80 prefixes normally announced by organizations such Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitch, NTT Communications and Riot Games were now detected in the global BGP routing tables with an Origin AS of 39523 (DV-LINK-AS), out of Russia.” states a  blog post published by Internet monitoring service BGPMon.
“Looking at timeline we can see two event windows of about three minutes each. The first one started at 04:43 UTC and ended at around 04:46 UTC. The second event started 07:07 UTC and finished at 07:10 UTC. 
Even though these events were relatively short lived, they were significant because it was picked up by a large number of peers and because of several new more specific prefixes that are not normally seen on the Internet. So let’s dig a little deeper. “

BGPMon observed two distinct events for a total of six minutes that affected 80 separate address blocks.

Another monitoring service, Qrator Labs, stated the event lasted for two hours during which the number of hijacked address blocks varied from 40 to 80.

BGPMon experts consider the incident as suspicious for the following reasons:

  • The rerouted traffic belonged to big tech companies.
  • Hijacked IP addresses belong to small and specific blocks that aren’t’ normally seen on the Internet.

“What makes this incident suspicious is the prefixes that were affected are all high profile destinations, as well as several more specific prefixes that aren’t normally seen on the Internet. This means that this isn’t a simple leak, but someone is intentionally inserting these more specific prefixes, possibly with the intent the attract traffic.” continues the analysis from BGPMon.

The BGP hijacking was caused by an autonomous system located in Russia that added entries to BGP tables claiming it was the legitimate origin of the 80 affected prefixes. This assertion caused large amounts of traffic sent to and received by the affected companies to pass through the Russian AS 39523 before being routed to its final destination.

Below the list of ISPs that picked up the new route:

  • xx 6939 31133 39523 (path via Hurricane Electric)
  • xx 6461 31133 39523 (path via Zayo)
  • xx 2603 31133 39523 (path via Nordunet)
  • xx 4637 31133 39523 (path via Telstra)

AS39523 is a previously unused autonomous system that hasn’t been active in years, but he made the headlines in August when it was involved in another BGP incident that involved Google.

“Whatever caused the incident today, it’s another clear example of how easy it is to re-route traffic for 3rd parties, intentionally or by accident. It also is a good reminder for every major ISP to filter customers. ” concluded BGPMon.

“This hijack highlights a common problem that arises due to lack of route filtering. We can blame AS39523 for the accident, but without proper filters at the intermediate transit providers boundaries we are doomed to see similar incidents again and again. We’d like to encourage all networks involved in this incident to review their route filtering strategy, and at the very least implement prefix-based BGP filters on all interconnections towards their customers.” concluded Qrator Labs.

[adrotate banner=”9″] [adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – BGP Hijacking, Russia)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

Recent Posts

Cisco warns of password-spraying attacks targeting Secure Firewall devices

Cisco warns customers of password-spraying attacks that have been targeting Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) services…

48 mins ago

American fast-fashion firm Hot Topic hit by credential stuffing attacks

Hot Topic suffered credential stuffing attacks that exposed customers' personal information and partial payment data.…

5 hours ago

Cisco addressed high-severity flaws in IOS and IOS XE software

Cisco addressed multiple vulnerabilities in IOS and IOS XE software that can be exploited to…

19 hours ago

Google: China dominates government exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2023

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant reported a surge in the number of actively…

1 day ago

Google addressed 2 Chrome zero-days demonstrated at Pwn2Own 2024

Google addressed two zero-day vulnerabilities in the Chrome web browser that have been demonstrated during…

2 days ago

INC Ransom stole 3TB of data from the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland

The INC Ransom extortion group hacked the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland and is threatening…

2 days ago

This website uses cookies.