BGP hijacking
BGP hijacking is when a network operator falsely announces, via the Border Gateway Protocol, that it owns a block of IP addresses it doesn't actually control. Because BGP was designed for an era of mutual trust between operators, other networks often accept the false announcement and start routing traffic for that address block through the hijacker, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. The traffic can be silently dropped, inspected, or redirected to a lookalike service before being passed on, which makes hijacking useful for both outages and interception. Defenses include Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) route-origin validation and route filtering by transit providers, but adoption is still incomplete worldwide. Victims usually learn about an incident from routing-monitoring services or from their own traffic suddenly taking an unexpected path.
By AdminKit team, Netbase JSC · Updated