Recent Posts by Doug Madory

Beginning at 09:43 UTC today (6 June 2019), Swiss data center colocation company AS21217 leaked over 70,000 routes to China Telecom (AS4134) in Frankfurt, Germany. China Telecom then announced these routes on to the global internet redirecting large amounts of internet traffic destined for some of the largest European mobile networks through China Telecom’s network. Impacts were seen by some of Europe's largest networks in Switzerland, Holland, and France among other...

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...

Earlier this morning, the national fiber backbone of Iraq was taken offline in an effort to combat cheating on 6th grade placement exams.  It was the fourth such outage in the past five days.   2017 marks the third year Iraq has used government-directed internet blackouts to combat cheating on student exams. These recent outages are a continuation of a growing (and somewhat puzzling) trend by governments in many developing parts of the world to cut communications services in a...