Dennis R. Gatens, Chief Commercial Officer

Back in the day a road trip was fun and a familiar weekend occurrence. However, an organization’s data can go on a road trip due to the vulnerabilities of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Not the kind of road trip a CISO wants to ever experience. BGP is a fundamental protocol found in routers used for domestic and global routing of traffic between networks. And it’s security vulnerabilities are well documented.

It was recently reported that user’s data took a road trip to China thanks to vulnerabilities in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Here’s the link to the full story as recently published by WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/google-internet-traffic-china-russia-rerouted/, and here are the highlights. ThousandEyes, a monitoring firm, saw Google traffic rerouting over the Russian ISP TransTelecom, to China Telecom, toward the Nigerian ISP Main One. “Russia, China, and Nigeria ISPs and 150-plus [IP address] prefixes—this is obviously very suspicious,” says Alex Henthorne-Iwane, vice-president of product marketing at ThousandEyes. “It doesn’t look like a mistake.” BGP hacking is how bad actors manipulate Internet routing to make traffic easier to intercept.

If an organization uses SpaceBelt™ DSaaS, this scenario cannot occur, as your data bypasses the terrestrial infrastructure and is therefore immune to the vulnerabilities of BGP and the other nearly infinite opportunities to access the terrestrial infrastructure for malicious intent.