If BGP is open and anybody can modify routes, why don't these attacks happen constantly? What prevents these sort of attacks and how are they fixed?
You know that if you do something nefarious, or if someone at your downstream does something nefarious, your upstream will identify it and block your traffic, or the part of it that they identify to be the issue.
Thus as long as you need to appear on the internet, you do your best to play nice, otherwise your traffic gets blocked, and you also do your part to identify and block traffic when something goes bad.
> They re-routed DNS traffic using a man in the middle attack using a server at Equinix in Chicago.
AS7007 incident demonstrated this being a bad idea in the nineties.
Believe it. HE has many, many netiron-based routers in their network and many, many ASNs as transit customers. the hardware doesn't have the capacity to implement complete filtering for everyone.
between hardware-constrained equipment being replaced and the tireless work Job Snijders (& others) are doing with route security, these kinds of episodes will become far more difficult and occur much, much less.
Sane networks register prefixes. Other sane networks do not accept prefixes that are not registered to parties announcing them.
If your network does not register prefixes, you need to fire them and move to someone else. If your network does not accept only registered prefixes, you need to fire them and move somewhere else.
Not registering prefixes/filtering based on registrations is having sex without condoms with a toothless hooker behind a dumpster who charges $5 for a full service.
If so then companies that intentionally advertise routes that are not theirs to advertise would lose their peering agreements with others because other companies would no longer want to peer with them.