Hacking You

Worthy of Hollywood, or at Least Cable Access Hijinks

For a couple of hours on Sunday last You Tube IP Address was hijacked. Below is a link for the stories. There is an excellent link in the article of this story marked "Time Line"(http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube_1.shtml).

The basics of this hack is that by order of the Pakistan Government false ads were put up by Pakistan Telecom. Pakistan Telecom responded by broadcasting the false claim that it was the correct route for 256 addresses in You Tube's 208.65.153.0 network space. Because that was a more specific destination than the true broadcast from You Tube saying it was home to 1,024 computers, within a few minutes traffic started flowing to the wrong place.

Within the space of less than a minute a large portion of You Tube traffic was sent off the trail to a dead end. To put this in simple terms legitimate hosts of the You Tube broadcasts were cut out by a bogus claim of Pakistan's ISP hosting the broadcasts.This is not the first time that such a quick switch has been accomplished (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2005/12/internetwide_nearcatastrophela.shtml).

The opinion is that measures should be in affect to double check all changes in addresses. One example suggested is the following: One way to handle this is for network providers to be automatically notified when the virtual location of an Internet address changes, which is what some researchers have suggested in the form of a "hijack alert system." Another is to treat broadcasts with changes of addresses as suspicious for 24 hours and then accept them as normal. Simple filtering of broadcasts may not always work because some networks provide connectivity to customers with thousands of different routes.

Probably the most extensive countermeasure would be a technology like Secure BGP, which uses encryption to verify which network providers own Internet addresses and are authorized to broadcast changes. But Secure BGP has been around in one form or another form since 1998, and is still not a widely-used standard, mostly because it adds complexity and routers that understand will add additional cost.If there is a way to fool people or disrupt service some people of a less democratic frame of mind will find it and use it.

When ideology clashes with human exchanges the result is often something as ugly as terrorism and in a very small way this is terrorism. Granted it is not the murder of innocents people, but it is a violation of the open concepts of the Internet and as librarians is just another in an endless list of reasons for librarians to be defenders and keeps of that which is virtual and not only the print.

Any thoughts?

Here is a link:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9878655-7.html?tag=nefd.lede