Rerouting endangered the data of the many huge companies and government bodies involved
Friday 13 March 2015
Internet data from the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment and other sensitive information was being sent through Ukraine, by mistake, all last week.
As well as the nuclear weapons body, which is “responsible for the design, manufacture and support of warheads for the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent”, traffic from the Post Office and elsewhere was accidentally being sent through Ukrainian providers. The BT internet traffic should was being rerouted through Ukrainian internet provider Vega, but security experts believe that the problem was a mistake.
Data would not normally be expected to flow that way, and the diversion through Ukraine is far from the most efficient route.
Fraudulent routing of this kind can allow criminals and other malicious agencies access to data but is relatively easy to do. Dyn, which discovered the problem in Ukraine, says that since routing is based “entirely on trust, it’s relatively easy to commandeer IP address space that belongs to someone else”.
While most of the traffic that was flowing over the networks would have been encrypted and so wouldn’t have been able to be read, users snoping in on email traffic would have been able to see the IP addresses — and therefore the company and the potential location — of those involved. It’s impossible to tell whether any data was snooped on or lost as it was rerouted.
As well as endangering the security of internet users, such problems can also slow down or break internet connectivity. That could cause huge economic damage.
Categories: Escalation / Destabilization Conflict
Engineering Evil 