For two hours, a large chunk of European mobile traffic was rerouted through China

[The AchieVer]

For two hours, a large chunk of European mobile traffic was rerouted through China

It was China Telecom, again. The same ISP accused last year of "hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries."

 

 

 

For more than two hours on Thursday, June 6, a large chunk of European mobile traffic was rerouted through the infrastructure of China Telecom, China's third-largest telco and internet service provider (ISP).

 

The incident occurred because of a BGP route leak at Swiss data center colocation company Safe Host, which accidentally leaked over 70,000 routes from its internal routing table to the Chinese ISP.

 

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used to reroute traffic at the ISP level, has been known to be problematic to work with, and BGP leaks happen all the time.

 

However, there are safeguards and safety procedures that providers usually set up to prevent BGP route leaks from influencing each other's networks.

 

But instead of ignoring the BGP leak, China Telecom re-announced Safe Host's routes as its own, and by doing so, interposed itself as one of the shortest ways to reach Safe Host's network and other nearby European telcos and ISPs.

MOBILE OPERATORS IN FRANCE, HOLLAND, SWITZERLAND AFFECTED

For the subsequent hours, until China Telecom operators realized what they have done, traffic meant for many European mobile networks was rerouted through China Telecom's network.

 

"Some of the most impacted European networks included Swisscom (AS3303) of Switzerland, KPN (AS1130) of Holland, and Bouygues Telecom (AS5410) and Numericable-SFR (AS21502) of France," said Doug Madory, Director of Oracle's Internet Analysis division (formerly Dyn).

 

"Often routing incidents like this only last for a few minutes, but in this case many of the leaked routes in this incident were in circulation for over two hours," Madory added.

 

For the users on the affected mobile network, this manifested as slow connections or the inability to connect to some servers.

 

 

Source

[mp68terr]

From the source about previous incidents:

"However, Madory couldn't say if this was intentional, or a technical or human error." 

[steven36]

4 hours ago, mp68terr said:

From the source about previous incidents:

"However, Madory couldn't say if this was intentional, or a technical or human error." 

Most of the time it comes from accidental misconfigurations and it happens from time to time . Great Firewall   of the EU . The EU are one of the places gun ho on paying billions for Chinese 5G and  i don't know  if China  use it for spying or not that's for the courts to decide , but  i don't even trust my own USA service providers  that why i use a VPN  much less trust internet from China  and I don't want to take that chance. My policy is trust no one  and not sympathize for them. I know for a fact If i lived in China that China would be spying on me and it would be hard to find a working VPN  that is not blocked , we have members on this board from China  who post proxies and things that have to use workarounds to even access western websites , stuff we take for granted  is a hard job for them . Always most sympathizers are not from  there  and don't have to live in such censorship or there paid Govt trolls pushing out disinformation .

 

In the USA  we have private owned websites and things that practice censorship because they lean to far to the left but its always it's your choice if you visit those sites . I don't care  if they do if I find something useful  on them i will abide by there rules and visit anyway if i don't have to sign in most of the time i don't. But I belong to forums in Vietnam for many years  and have belonged to some from China and i follow there rules when on them.  I like sites like Nsanedown witch allow us to post  our software and things without censorship . All places use censorship as and excuse to protect us from  evil when evil have existed since  the beginning of time and will always be with us .