Security News > 2020 > April > Russian Telco Hijacked Internet Traffic of Major Networks - Accident or Malicious Action?
A huge BGP hijack by Russian state telecommunications provider Rostelecom diverted the traffic from more than 200 networks - including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Cloudflare - to Russian servers on April 1.
Internet traffic routes are managed by the Border Gateway Protocol, which controls the way in which internet traffic moves from one autonomous system network to the next on its way to its destination.
A BGP-based hijack of internet traffic can be as simple as that - the hijacking BGP device advertises to its neighbors that they should send certain traffic to their own servers.
In 2017, Rostelecom curiously managed to accidentally hijack only major financial entities.
Andrei Robachevsky, senior technology program manager at the Internet Society, told SecurityWeek, differentiate between accidental and malicious hijacks.