Re: [gentoo-user] Somewhat OT: Any truth to this mess?

[Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info>]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 21:36, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:00:00 -0600
> Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > And no, the intartubes will NOT be switched off.
>> >
>>
>> I don't really think they can unless they just cut power to all the
>> computers.  After all, the internet is supposed to be redundant right?
>> If there is a few computers still running that have a connection, it
>> is still working.  Sort of anyway.
>>
>> Does make one wonder tho.  They have been talking about having a
>> internet "off switch" but I'm not sure it would be that easy.
>
> To switch off the internet, you don't switch off the computers on the
> internet. You switch off the routers that drive the internet.
>

You don't need to turn off the routers.

Just inject BGP poison.

I just re-found the news:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9197019/Update_Report_sounds_alarm_on_China_s_rerouting_of_U.S._Internet_traffic

The article I linked above contains 2 incidents:

The first incident rerouted traffic for a huge swath of Internet,
including traffic destined to Microsoft, the Office of the USA SecDef,
and others.

The second incident blocked traffic for some sites, notably Twitter,
Yahoo, and Facebook.

BOTH incidents happened because of BGP poisoning. BOTH incidents
affected traffic FROM the USA to destinations IN the USA even though
the poisoning happened from OUTSIDE of the USA.

The country where both incidents happened (in these cases, China) is
not essential. ANY country with a BGP router connected to the backbone
can easily poison other international backbone routers. Especially if
said country has a HUGE International bandwidth.

Rgds,
-- 
FdS Pandu E Poluan
~ IT Optimizer ~

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