for those interested in the matter tom Dear Colleagues, As you may be aware from recent news reports, traffic to the youtube.com website was 'hijacked' on a global scale on Sunday, 24 February 2008. The incident was a result of the unauthorised announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24 and caused the popular video sharing website to become unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. The RIPE NCC conducted an analysis into how this incident was seen and tracked by the RIPE NCC's Routing Information Service (RIS) and has published a case study at: http://www.ripe.net/news/study-youtube-hijacking.html The RIPE NCC RIS is a service that collects Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing information from roughly 600 peers at 16 Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) across the world. Data is stored in near real-time and can be instantly queried by anyone to provide multiple views of routing activity for any point in time. The RIS forms part of the RIPE NCC's suite of Information Services, which together provide a deeper insight into the workings of the Internet. The RIPE NCC is a neutral and impartial organisation, and commercial interests therefore do not influence the data collected. The RIPE NCC Information Services suite also includes the Test Traffic Measurement (TTM) service, the DNS Monitoring (DNSMON) service and Hostcount. All of these services are available to anyone, and most of them are offered free of charge. More information about RIPE NCC Information Services can be found at: http://is-portal.ripe.net Regards, Daniel Karrenberg Chief Scientist, RIPE NCC