[renesys] The New Threat: Targeted Internet Traffic Misdirection

Tue Nov 26 21:31:04 UTC 2013

first, awesome, thanks...

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote:
<snip>
>   68.164.80.0/20
>   68.164.96.0/21
>   68.164.126.0/23
>   68.164.160.0/21
>   68.164.192.0/21
>   68.164.208.0/23
>
> These addresses have no relationship with Iceland so we can say it's a
> hijacking. But do note there is no AS prepending in the announce (the
> trick described by Kapela & PIlosov to create a clean return path).

yea.. so this smells, to me, like a leak from a 'route optomization'
box (netvmg or whatever they eventually became). These are all pretty
small prefixes and there are covering routes for these as well: (for
one: 68.164.24.0/21  - from the RV data)

18566   | 68.164.0.0/14       | MEGAPATH5-US - MegaPath Corporation
18566   | 68.164.24.0/21      | MEGAPATH5-US - MegaPath Corporation

so... err... potentially:
  1) route-optomization-box sends routes into iBGP with local origin-as
  2) routes aren't properly managed (community/etc) from local ISP ->
transits/peers
  3) peers/transits didn't filter (some of them did apparently)
  4) routes make it into the larger DFZ (or parts of the dfz at least, clearly)

Traffic comes to 68.164.24.1 along a 'false path' in the dfz, in to
the icelandic ISP and follows the iBGP learned path exiting
(fortunately) out the isp that filtered...

I'm sure you could construct lots of other pathological cases, but
this seems plausible enough to me...
>
> Finding the other announces in RouteViews is left as an exercice
> (hint: use a RouteViews collector close from the announce, here in
> England, because the hijacking announce did not propagate everywhere).