Hi and welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life besides I'm Ran Levy. In 2015, the US and China signed an agreement that stated that both countries would stop their military forces

from hacking and stealing information from each other.

Three years later, in 2018, a paper published by two researchers Dr. Chris Demchak from the Center

of Cyber Conflict Studies at the U.S. Naval War College and Dr. Yuvalchovit from Tel Aviv University's Naval Perundi following the 2015 agreement, a technique known as B.G.P. hijacking or I.P. hijacking.

In a nutshell, B.G.P. hijacking is when a malicious actor takes over a group of IP addresses

that belongs to someone else and forces the rerouting of all or most internet traffic to these addresses.

To steal an analogy from Cloudflare's explainer page on BGB hijacking,

it's like if someone were to change all the signs on a stretch of freeway and reroute road traffic

onto incorrect exits. In the paper, Chavit and Damchak, identify several such attacks by China in the past several years.

In 2016, for six straight months, communications between Canadian and Korean government networks were hijacked by China Telecom

and routed through China. In 2017, traffic from Sweden and Norway to a large American news organization in Japan was hijacked to China for about six weeks.

Russia might be doing the same.

In 2017, traffic for Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and several other

high-profile organizations was hijacked to Russia for two short periods of three minutes each.

What are the implications of BGB or IP hijacking?

According to Damchak and Duval's paper, this technique offers the attackers broad access to an organization's network,

allowing them to steal valuable data, add malicious implants to seemingly normal traffic, neutralize the organization's firewall, and much more.

I found IP hijacking to be an interesting topic not only because of its implications but because it also brings forth an aspect of our internet technology that we rarely think about.

Geography. Yes, geography. We tend to think of internet traffic as disconnected from the physical

space we occupy. That cyberspace somehow eliminates the distances between geographical points.

But as IP hijacking shows, and as you'll shortly learn, it turns out that geography still

matters even when it comes to the internet.

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