News Article 1

News Article 1
“Revealed: The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole”.
By Kim Zetter for wired.com
August 26, 2008

The internet has become a part of our everyday life from a networking and information portal that most people spend hours a day on. But what would happen if all our important secret information that we send online could be hacked and interrupted? Why is the internet still not a secure place for our information to travel? Pieter Zatko a security expert even described in great detail to government agents how BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) could be exploited to have the ability to eavesdrop personal information. The ability to eavesdrop using BGP isn’t a bug or a flaw in the system it is just able to convert the natural way the system works. BGP links the networks and the company’s portals tell BGP the easiest and quickest way to transmit the information to the destination. The problem exists when a router tells BGP the best route and BGP is trusting and believes it. This allows hackers interfere and tell a router where to send information. This allows hackers to eavesdrop on information and this is called an IP hijack. IP hijacks before have even created outages. Pakistan Telecom even inevertendly hijacked information from YouTube traffic from around the world. There are many people working on solutions and prevention to this problem especially using the YouTube hijack as an example. However, this problem has been known for awhile and no one has fixed the problem yet and researchers hope that this glitch isn’t discovered and exploited. The next time you type in an IP address will you think about your communication line of travel being hijacked and interrupted? Maybe you should.