February 2006 Archives

Tom Scholl has put up a hilarious parody of a peering cruise.

It's meant to poke fun at the real peering cruise sponsored by Terremark, Equinix, Switch and Data, AMS-IX and DE-CIX. All of these companies operate infrastructure used by major networks to locate equipment and exchange traffic. Also kicking in sponsorship dollars is Force 10 who makes switches used by many of these organizations to connect up their networking customers.

It's Groundhog Day and everything old is new again. Dave Rand at Trend Micro (from the Kelkea acquisition which was MAPS before that), is making noise about spammers hijacking BGP announcements. He describes a technique where spammers inject a route for a short period of time, source a bunch of spam from it and then withdraw the route. This means that the actual IP addresses used to send the spam are routed to someone other than their registered owner at the time the spam is sent. Nasty stuff.

BGP hijacking (unauthorized route injection) has been discussed (and mitigated) for many years now. The fact that Trend Micro appears to be just discovering it and that they're "working on a protection scheme" without any reference to the existing work (and commercially available protection schemes that are already deployed) is not encouraging.