Recent Posts by Doug Madory

Last month, ETECSA (Cuba's state telecom) activated national 3G mobile service.  For the first time in the nation's history, a very modest level of internet service is now available to anyone on the island with a 3G-capable device and the funds to pay for it (i.e., 45cuc per month or almost twice the monthly salary of a Cuban state worker). The development was announced in a tweet from Cuba's new president Miguel Díaz-Canel and came almost six years since the activation...

In recent weeks, the Naval War College published a paper that contained a number of claims about purported efforts by the Chinese government to manipulate BGP routing in order to intercept internet traffic. In this blog post, I don’t intend to address the paper’s claims around the motivations of these actions. However, there is truth to the assertion that China Telecom (whether intentionally or not) has misdirected internet traffic (including out of the United States) in...

Yesterday marked the first time in recent Internet history that a new submarine cable carried live traffic across the South Atlantic, directly connecting South America to Sub-Saharan Africa.  The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) built by Angola Cables achieved this feat around midday on 18 September 2018. Our Internet monitoring tools noticed a change in latency between our measurement servers in various Brazilian cities and Luanda, Angola, decreasing from over 300ms to...

The latest development in Yemen's long-running civil war is playing out in the global routing table. The country's Internet is now being partitioned along the conflict's battle lines with the recent activation of a new telecom in government-controlled Aden. Control of YemenNet The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels currently hold the nation's capital Sana'a in the north, while Saudi-backed forces loyal to the president hold the port city of Aden in the south (illustrated in the map...

In April 2018, we detailed a brazen BGP hijack of Amazon's authoritative DNS service in order to redirect users of a crypto currency wallet service to a fraudulent website ready to steal their money. In the past month, we have observed additional BGP hijacks of authoritative DNS servers with a technique similar to what was used in April. This time the targets included US payment processing companies. As in the Amazon case, these more recent BGP hijacks enabled imposter DNS...

After a week of widespread protests against corruption and poor government services, the Iraqi government declared a state of emergency last week.  And as part of that measure, the government ordered the disconnection of the fiber backbone of Iraq that carries traffic for most of the country. On Monday, Internet services in Iraq were coming back online (however, social media site are still blocked according to independent measurement outfit NetBlocks). The blackout, which...

It started with a lengthy email to the NANOG mailing list on 25 June 2018: independent security researcher Ronald Guilmette detailed the suspicious routing activities of a company called Bitcanal, whom he referred to as a “Hijack Factory.”  In his post, Ronald detailed some of the Portuguese company’s most recent BGP hijacks and asked the question: why Bitcanal’s transit providers continue to carry its BGP hijacked routes on to the global internet? This email kicked off a...