Experiment shut down parts of the Internet last friday...

[Disinfoagent007 Profile]

Anybody noticed anything?

IExperiment provides Internet shutdown - partly
A research experiment cut short a percentage of the world's Internet traffic.

DG News Service: Something went wrong last Friday during an experiment conducted by Duke University in North Carolina in the U.S. in collaboration with a European organization with responsibility for management of Internet resources. The experiment cut off a good percentage of Internet traffic.

It could however have gone much worse, and the incident shows, according to security experts, the vulnerability of one of the Internet's core protocols really are.

The problem occurred Friday morning just before 11 o'clock Danish time and lasted less than half an hour. It started when Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) and Duke University conducted an experiment involving Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) used by routers to know whither the Internet, they send their traffic. RIPE began sending DGP-routes were configured a bit differently than normal because they used an experimental data format. RIPE's data was quickly sent from router to router on the Internet, and within minutes it became clear that this created problems.

"During this deployment reported several ISPs about problems with their network infrastructure," writes Erik Romijn from the RIPE NCC in a message on the discussion list North American Network Operators Group. "Immediately after this discovery, we stopped the broadcast and began to investigate the problem. Our study has shown that the problem probably was caused by that certain types of routers incorrectly modified the experimental attribute and then sent the deformation route to other routers."

It should not be done on systems that were properly configured to support BGP, "says Romijn, but nevertheless was approximately one percent of all Internet traffic Friday morning hit by this bug, since router after router does not correctly handle the BGP- routes that they received "Over 3,500 prefixes (detached blocks of IP addresses) was unstable, precisely the moment this 'experiment' began," writes Earl Zmijewski, general manager for Internet security firm Renesys, in a blog post. "Not surprisingly, they were located all over the world: 832 in the U.S., 336 in Russia, 277 in Argentina, 256 in Romania and so on. We have talked over 60 countries that were hit."

Security experts have for years warned that you may cause serious disruptions of the Internet by attacking BGP routes. Two years ago, YouTube temporarily cut off from the Internet, as a Pakistani-BGP route that censored video service, inadvertently were scattered around the globe.

Earlier this year it happened also that the routes sent from China ended up briefly interrupting share of Internet traffic.

The experiment last Friday did minimal damage, but if it succeeded with no clear intentions to broadcast bad routes, it could go much worse, "says Paul Ferguson from security firm Trend Micro.

It is not clear why the RIPE NCC and Duke tried these new routers formats.

One of the researchers behind the experiment, assistant professor from Duke University Xiaowei Yang, refuses to talk about the details behind the experiment for reasons of legal questions. She indicates, however, that work was in connection with a research article, and they sent BGP data "unobserved standards 100 percent."

"The experiment was performed by my students and me," she writes via email. "It triggered some unexpected errors in suppliers' equipment."

It was not immediately possible to get a comment from RIPE NCC.
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/100966/ ... ist?page=1

[Mediasorcerer Profile]

oh yeh,"students",of course,COUGH!!!!and everybodies all worried about iran?,talk about being strung along ,chinas got"students"deployed all over the world,and when the time is right!!!
meanwhile,all the SHEEP are all polarised up about iran-israel-palestine,,the middle east,but the real sleeping dragon is right under our noses,
yeh,keep being distracted everyone,the ptb is up there pulling your strings,keep crapping on about the middle east,the ptb know all about china,watch them run underground wen the shit goes down.