At DEFCON, Tony Kapela and Alex Pilosov demonstrated a drastic weakness in the Internet's framework that had long been rumored, but wasn't believed practical. They showed how to hijack BGP (the border gateway protocol) in order to eavesdrop on Net traffic in a way that wouldn't be simple to detect. Quoting: "'It's at least as big an issue as the DNS issue, if not bigger,' said Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko, noted micro* firmness expert and former member of the L0pht hacking group, who testified to chamber in 1998 that he could bring down the world wide web in 30 minutes using a similar BGP attack, and disclosed privately to politics agents how BGP could also be exploited to eavesdrop. 'I went around screaming my head about this about ten or twelve years ago... We described this to word




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agencies and to the national pledge Council, in detail.' The man-in-the-middle attack exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper's network." Here's the PDF of Kapela and Pilosov's presentation.

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Mark