On 2008/08/28 06:45 AM Hank Nussbacher wrote:
They didn't have control of any routers other than their own. What they had to find is a single clueless upstream ISP that would allow them to announce prefixes that didn't belong to them.
Leaving aside the ability blackhole prefixes that don't belong to you, they seem to harp on the part of being able to intercept traffic. Well, yes? Personally I don't trust GBLX (sorry) or whoever with my traffic any more than a random hacker who is rerouting the traffic. That's why things like SSL were invented. Yes, with that much control even SSL can technically be broken but if there was ever a pretext of complete trust about the possibilities of snooping on traffic then encryption wouldn't need to exist. Ultimately though, the detailed work that needs to go into pulling something like that off would make it quite hard not to leave a trail somewhere. Also, it's still far easier to just pop a trojan onto a few million machines. Shameless media hyperbole anyway... I think they saw the DNS people getting their 10 minutes of fame and wanted their own :)