Originally posted by: FanFiltration
YouTube homepage, AFP/Getty
A router problem made YouTube inaccessible for many
"We are seeing a large shift from attacks that are directed at individual websites," he said. "The sophistication is getting a little smarter and they are attacking the infrastructure pieces behind them..., which is typically in most production environments the least invested in."
Some of the basic systems of the net, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which helps data reach its intended destination, were open to attack.
An accidental misconfiguration of BGP in some routers in Pakistan caused the recent problems with YouTube which left many people unable to reach the video site.
"BGP is essentially a relatively unprotected protocol and is seriously vulnerable to disruption," he said. "Should that happen, it could take a very long time to correct that situation."
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YouTube homepage, AFP/Getty
A router problem made YouTube inaccessible for many
"We are seeing a large shift from attacks that are directed at individual websites," he said. "The sophistication is getting a little smarter and they are attacking the infrastructure pieces behind them..., which is typically in most production environments the least invested in."
Some of the basic systems of the net, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which helps data reach its intended destination, were open to attack.
An accidental misconfiguration of BGP in some routers in Pakistan caused the recent problems with YouTube which left many people unable to reach the video site.
"BGP is essentially a relatively unprotected protocol and is seriously vulnerable to disruption," he said. "Should that happen, it could take a very long time to correct that situation."
CLICK HERE FOR STORY SOURCE
First, it wasn't a router problem.
Second, the protocol did everything exactly the way it was designed to do.
Third, the problem was human error. The Pakistani government wanted YouTube blocked. So the ISPs in Pakistan blocked it, except they published the block higher up the chain and the other routers accepted it. That is exactly the way it's suppose to work. It works like that so if you change a route (to ROUTE around problems), you can then publish that new route in order to ROUTE around problems.
That part of the story is a red herring. Any company as large as YouTube has monitoring systems in place and they'll know when something like that happens. They'll also be able to fix the problem very quickly. Having YouTube offline for 2 hours is the LEAST of my worries during a terrorist attack. Having the power go out in the middle of the day is much closer to the top of my "worry list". Fortunately, most of those systems are not directly tied into the Internet, so there's very little to worry about there.