Hanlon's Razor & BGP Hijacking: You can't really be that incompetent, can you?

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Presented at BSidesNova 2019 by

Allan Liska

Hanlon's razor states, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" which is a perfect way to describe many of the newsmaking BGP Hijackings that have occurred over the last few years. Everyone from Google to Amazon to the US Government has been impacted by one of these hijacks, which almost always turn out to be the result of user error.The problem is that it seems the same Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) are repeatedly at the center of some of these large hijackings. At what point does incompetence give way to maliciousness? This presentation will look at thousands of ASNs and reported hijackings to show patterns in certain ASNs that fall outside the norms of "incompetence" and veer into maliciousness.The presentation will also offer some suggestions for concrete steps that organizations can take to protect themselves from BGP Hijacking, malicious or otherwise.