What evil could one do with this?
They could have been after something specific in the traffic but my unqualified guess is that it was a test or they were showing off.
If you could temporarily redirect BGP at an arbitrary time, at diplomatic risk, what would be the best use of that?
Surely OpenNet/ClassNet/NIPRNet/SIPRNet/GWAN/JWICS aren't accepting BGP updates, where they even touch public network infrastructure.
And I can't think of anything outside those huge spheres that would be worth burning a capability like that on a lark.
Maybe bulk sensitive data transfer? I.e. some site-to-site backup?
Or you're just looking at the metadata of where-to-where, with the goal of finding future targets.
If i understand, the article is not so much a typical bgp hijack but the attacker gaining control of their account that controls routing. Seems like private networks would be just as vulnerable to that.
Though I'd hope that Orange doesn't provide network management services for the Spanish military! Some things are better kept in-house.
Less familiar with how European sensitive networks are architected.
Some governments have physical tunnel networks to move people who matter around. Computer networks follow pretty much without a loss of generality.
In 2017, Rostelecom grabbed financial & other network data for a few minutes. https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/rostelecom-route-leak-targ...
In 2020 Rostelecom announced lots of networks they didn't own and got that traffic for an hour. Early analysis felt it was accidental. Not sure about later analysis. https://www.zdnet.com/article/russian-telco-hijacks-internet... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22789754
But 2 months ago, Rostelecom grabbed a chunk of Apple's network (which I missed) https://cybernews.com/apple-network-traffic-went-through-rus...
Big impacts that come to mind (depending on what is being hijacked):
- dos attack
- pasive eavesdropping (not of encrypted contents, but who is connecting to who)
- hijacking plain http
- hijacking things like ssh where nobody pays attention to the mitm warnings
- potentially creating a new tls certificate to further do a later attack
What is the overlap between the set of people who think "pass1234" is a good password and the set of people who have great oversight of their cert issuance and would flag unexpected issuances ? I'd expect it to be approximately empty.
They give you the certificate, which contains the issuer's CPS. If it's an issuer that you (the domain owner) don't recognize, you have at least a starting point for reaching out.
> … and they take up to 24 hours to do that.
Indeed, the Maximum Merge Delay is 24 hours. But in practice, by monitoring multiple CT logs, it takes just a minute from successful issuance to having the certificate show up in at least one CT log (see https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebProbeSpeedNe...).
In theory, if it was just your site ip that was attacked and not your dns provider, CAA record can protect you. Probably one of the few cases where dns-sec is actually useful. All that though is an edge case that probably doesn't apply 99% of the time.
The same could be said for many necessary security measures.
Let's Encrypt has supported RFC 8657 for over a year now: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/enabling-acme-caa-accoun...