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Recent routing leaks remind us why monitoring Internet routing and performance is important and requires effective tools. Routing leaks are the ‘benign cousin’ of the malicious BGP route hijack. They happen accidentally, but the result is the same: traffic to affected prefixes is redirected, lost, or intercepted. And if they happen to you, your online business and brand suffers.
In this blog, we look at examples of a full-table peer leak, an origination leak, and a small peer leak and what happens to traffic when these incidents occur. As we will see, some events can go on for years, undetected and hence, unremediated, but extremely impactful never the less. As you read this blog, keep the following questions in mind. Would you know if the events described here were happening to you? Would you know how to identify the culprit if you did?
iTel/Peer1 routing leak
Starting on 10 October at 10:54 UTC, iTel (AS16696) leaked a full routing table (555,010 routes) to Peer 1 (AS13768). Normally, iTel exports 49 routes to Peer 1; however, over the course of several minutes, it leaked 436,776 routes from Hurricane Electric (AS6939) and 229,537 Continue reading