BGP hijacking

BGP hijacking in simple terms is defined as the rerouting of the ongoing traffic from one AS to another AS, which is completely owned by the attackers. BGP hijacking is also known as prefix, route, or IP hijacking.

Let’s understand this with a small example. Imagine every day everyone takes different routes from home in the morning to reach the same destination, which only has a single road to go and come back from it. Now, suddenly, one day, a parallel road is designed by hijackers, and as an announcement, a sign has been installed that signals that this is the shortest road to reach the destination, so everybody turns down that newly built road. After this, all of the traffic will eventually be hijacked by the attacker. Let’s frame this with a simple diagram, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 12.25 – Traffic hijacking

As shown in Figure 12.25, an attacker or a hijacker created a fake road just parallel to the...