Cogent Abuse - Bogus Propagation of ASN 36471

Thu Jul 20 17:09:04 UTC 2023

Heck, I can’t even get Cogent to keep my paid services functional; going on four weeks with an unusable 10gig point to point.

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+dhubbard=dino.hostasaurus.com at nanog.org> on behalf of Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net>
Date: Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 1:03 PM
To: Tom Beecher <beecher at beecher.cc>
Cc: nanog at nanog.org <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Cogent Abuse - Bogus Propagation of ASN 36471
If they (or anyone else) want to give me free service to use as I see fit (well, legally), I'll gladly accept their offer.

-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com

________________________________
From: "Tom Beecher" <beecher at beecher.cc>
To: "Matthew Petach" <mpetach at netflight.com>
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2023 11:38:50 AM
Subject: Re: Cogent Abuse - Bogus Propagation of ASN 36471
In short--I'm having a hard time understanding how a non-paying entity still has working connectivity and BGP sessions, which makes me suspect there's a different side to this story we're not hearing yet.   ^_^;

I know Cogent has long offered very cheap transit prices, but this seems very aggressive! :)

On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 12:28 PM Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com<mailto:mpetach at netflight.com>> wrote:

On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 8:09 AM Pete Rohrman <prohrman at stage2networks.com<mailto:prohrman at stage2networks.com>> wrote:

Ben,

Compromised as in a nefarious entity went into the router and changed passwords and did whatever.  Everything advertised by that comprised router is bogus.  The compromised router is owned by OrgID: S2NL (now defunct).  AS 36471 belongs to KDSS-23<https://search.arin.net/rdap?query=KDSS-23&searchFilter=entity>.  The compromised router does not belong to Kratos KDSS-23<https://search.arin.net/rdap?query=KDSS-23&searchFilter=entity>, and is causing routing problems.  The compromised router needs to be shut down.  The owner of the compromised router ceased business, and there isn't anyone around to address this at S2NL.  The only people that can resolve this is Cogent.   Cogent's defunct customer's router was compromised, and is spewing out bogus advertisements.

Pete

Hi Pete,

This seems a bit confusing.

So, S2NL was a bill-paying customer of Cogent with a BGP speaking router.
They went out of business, and stopped paying their Cogent bills.
Cogent, out of the goodness of their hearts, continued to let a non-paying customer keep their connectivity up and active, and continued to freely import prefixes across BGP neighbors from this non-paying defunct customer.
Now, someone else has gained access to this non-paying, defunct customer's router (which Cogent is still providing free connectivity to, out of the goodness of their hearts), and is generating RPKI-valid announcements from it, which have somehow not caused a flurry of messages on the outages list about prefix hijackings.

The elements to your claim don't really seem to add up.
1) ISPs aren't famous for letting non-bill-paying customers stay connected for very long past the grace period on their billing cycle, let alone long after the company has gone belly-up.
2) It's not impossible to generate RPKI-valid announcements from a hijacked network, but it's very difficult to generate *bogus* RPKI-valid announcements from a compromised router--that's the whole point of RPKI, to be able to validate that the prefixes being announced from an origin are indeed the ones that are owned by that origin.

Can you provide specific prefix and AS_PATH combinations being originated by that router that are "bogus" and don't belong to the router's ASN?

If, however, what you meant is that the router used to be ASN XXXXX, and is now suddenly showing up as ASN 36471, and Cogent happily changed their BGP neighbor statements to match the new ASN, even though the entity no longer exists and hasn't been paying their bills for some time, then that would imply a level of complicity on Cogent's part that would make them unlikely to respond to your abuse reports.  That would be a very strong allegation to make, and the necessary level of documented proof of that level of malfeasance would be substantial.

In short--I'm having a hard time understanding how a non-paying entity still has working connectivity and BGP sessions, which makes me suspect there's a different side to this story we're not hearing yet.   ^_^;

Thanks!

Matt

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