Best way to deal with bad advertisements?

Sat Sep 28 15:08:44 UTC 1996

Hi!

I'm going to ask the rest of the NANOG community 
for their thoughts/opinions on a problem that's
been plaguing us periodically that we haven't
been able to find a satisfactory solution for
yet.

There's an ISP back on the East Coast that has
been periodically advertising more specific
routes for /24's out of our CIDR blocks and
black-holing the traffic within their network.

We've called all the listed numbers for their
technical, admin, billing, and any other contacts
we can find, and haven't been able to reach a 
human; we've left messages of various levels of
nastyness, from very sugary on up to vaguely
threatening.  In every case, including the
current one, it's been more than 24 hours,
and they still haven't made any response to
the problem; in fact, I just got paged by our
NOC early this morning informing me they've
stolen another one of our /24's.

As you can well imagine, all the customers on
those blocks are _very_ unhappy.  Each time this
happens, we end up with dissatisfied customers,
many of whom leave, deciding that we're too
unstable, and can't provide quality network
connectivity, even though to the best of my
knowledge, there's nothing we can do to prevent
these people from stealing our blocks.

My question to the NANOG community is twofold and
simple:  Am I overlooking some solution that would
allow us to 'negate' their advertisement of our
blocks (205.159.193.0/24 and 207.88.102.0/24 in
this case) and secondly, is there a formal process
within the community to seek recompense, or formal
action against a clueless and net-unfriendly ISP,
perhaps one as simple as the net equivalent of 
Mennonite 'shunning'?

Or are we simply out of luck, and have to simply
tell our customers "Sorry, everyone is at the
mercy of the morons who can steal IP blocks
simply by advertising more specific routes
with higher weights?"

It's getting really tempting to advertise the
networks they have their nameservers on from
*our* network with a weight of 65535, just to
get them to call us back.  :-(  :-(

Anyhow, enough frustrated venting, I *am* very
interested in what the community feels is the 
best policy to follow in situations like this.

Thanks again!

Matt Petach
Network Engineer
(writing from home)