Online Black Hole Expands

A big black hole was found online and is currently being used to suck up personal information. A couple of security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference have revealed massive security vulnerability in the worldwide online traffic-routing system 5 years ago – so severe one that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of information.

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The collection of the information could be carried out in a way that nobody would ever notice, as the intruders simply re-rout traffic to a router they controlled. Then the data was forwarded to its intended destination.

Today it appears that someone keeps using this technique to hijack traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the United States. The data is redirected to servers located in Belarus and Iceland, before being sent on its way to its legitimate destinations.

Security researchers said that earlier in 2013 someone diverted the traffic through the same vulnerability in the so-called Border Gateway Protocol. They found out that the technology was used 38 times, collecting traffic from about 1,500 individual IP blocks.

Initially the experts thought the motive was financial, but then the hackers started diverting traffic intended for the foreign ministries of various countries. The experts don’t know who is behind the attacks but its characteristics indicate they were intentional. The attacks happen in some form on a daily basis, but it is in most cases unintentional and is a result of a typo in a routing announcement. The researchers point out that when it happens, it creates an outage because the traffic never reaches its destination.

Three years ago, China Telecom made an announcement for over 50,000 blocks of IP addresses, and within minutes some of the traffic destined for those domains got sucked into its network for twenty minutes. At the time, it was believes that China hacked those IP addresses, but experts think that the China crisis was a terrible mistake rather than deliberate.