The other is our new hot topic of security, not sure if anyone has thought of this yet (or how interesting it is) but the nature of the bgp attack means that if you can view a BGP session you can figure things about a peer that would otherwise be hidden from you in particular the port numbers in use.. and I'm not entirely clear on the details but it sounds like when you hit the first session, you can take the rest out very easily.
We cant take BGP out of band (yet!), perhaps we can keep it better hidden from view tho..
There are more protection methods available than just MD5 (as you allude to Steve). One mitigator is to use "non-routed" space for BGP peer connections. If you have the ability to filter on TTL 255 you are in even better shape (arguably perfectly secure against all but configuration/hardware failures). You have some vulnerability with non-routed space if you do default routing or have folks who default towards the device doing the BGP peering though. Source routing is also a potential hazard for the non-routed solution (does anyone have this enabled anymore?). Apologies for the morph but this raised a great point. Regards, Blaine