Tag Archive for: Backbone

What is encryption? The backbone of computer security, explained


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A Major Internet Backbone Company Cuts Off Russia


Russia’s War of choice against Ukraine drew global attention this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin continuing to escalate the conflict as the United States and Europe moved to drastically isolate the Kremlin. Though the front lines of battle have not been digital, Ukraine emphasized this week that Russia is pummeling the embattled country’s computer networks with hacking attempts. After years of such activity, Ukrainian internet infrastructure is resilient, and the Ukrainian government is also experimenting with the formation of a volunteer “IT Army” to organize recruits from all over the world for its cause.

Ukrainians have been relying on the messaging platform Telegram to get much of their news and official government updates about the situation, and hacktivists have been attempting to make their mark in the conflict as well, though their actions are often dwarfed by the reality of kinetic war.

We’ve got the story of an online troll who used tactics such as misleading press releases and tricky domain names in an effort to sabotage competitors in the nonalcoholic spirit industry. And the startup Kytch, which sold a device for fixing McDonald’s ice cream machines before the fast food giant crushed its business, is suing the Golden aAches for $900 million in damages

But wait, there’s more. We’ve rounded up all the news here that we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

US internet infrastructure company Cogent Communications said on Friday that it is ending relationships with its Russian customers, including the state-owned Russian telecoms Rostelecom and TransTelekom. The global internet is interdependent, and Russia has other backbone providers besides Cogent to stay connected to the world, but the company is one of the biggest. Cogent said it weighed the risks that some people in Russia will lose global connectivity against the possibility that the Russian government will benefit from Cogent’s service in mounting disinformation campaigns and hacks against Ukrainian targets. “Our goal is not to hurt anyone. It’s just to not empower the Russian government to have another tool in…

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A Broken Piece of Internet Backbone Might Finally Get Fixed


This spring, services from heavy hitters like Google and Facebook seemed glitchy or inaccessible for people worldwide for more than an hour. But it wasn’t a hack, or even a glitch at any one organization. It was the latest mishap to stem from design weaknesses in the “Border Gateway Protocol,” the internet’s foundational, universal routing system. Now, after years of slow progress implementing improvements and safeguards, a coalition of internet infrastructure partners is finally turning a corner in its fight to make BGP more secure.

Today the group known as Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security is announcing a task force specifically dedicated to helping “content delivery networks” and other cloud services adopt the filters and cryptographic checks needed to harden BGP. In some ways the step is incremental, given that MANRS has already formed task forces for network operators and what are known as “internet exchange points,” the physical hardware infrastructure where internet service providers and CDNs hand off data to each others’ networks. But that process coming to the cloud represents tangible progress that has been elusive up until now.

“With nearly 600 total participants in MANRS so far, we believe the enthusiasm and hard work of the CDN and cloud providers will encourage other network operators around the globe to improve routing security for us all,” says Aftab Siddiqui, the MANRS project lead and a senior manager of internet technology at the Internet Society.

BGP is often likened to a GPS navigation service for the internet, enabling infrastructure players to swiftly and automatically determine routes for sending and receiving data across the complex digital topography. And like your favorite GPS mapping tool, BGP has quirks and flaws that don’t usually cause problems, but can occasionally land you in major bridge traffic. This happens when entities like internet service providers “advertise a bad route,” sending data on a haphazard, ill-advised journey across the internet and often into oblivion. That’s when web services start to seem like they’re down. And the risks from this…

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