The Internet Is Your Oyster: MANRS at International Telecoms Week
What do oysters, clams, and mussels have in common with network operators? Hint: it’s not just that they are both in Atlanta this week, either in exhibits in the Georgia Aquarium or for the 2019 International Telecoms Week.
It’s that both bivalves and network operators play an incredibly important role for their ecosystems: they filter the bad stuff out and leave things a lot cleaner.
As water quality is vital to life in the ocean, the global routing system is vital to the smooth functioning of the Internet. The routing system’s decentralized structure, made up of thousands of independent networks tied together through business decisions and trusted relationships, provides flexibility, scalability, and overall durability.
However, despite its strengths, thousands of routing incidents occur every year. Some of these can be pretty scary, with route hijacks sending government traffic through the networks of foreign adversaries; route leaks slowing parts of the global Internet to a crawl; or hackers using spoofed traffic to take down websites in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Network operators can help mitigate these problems by using stronger filtering policies to block spoofed traffic coming from their networks (helping guard against DDoS attacks) and filter route announcements Continue reading
