BGP Hijacking:
Following the Indian government’s temporary block on Telegram, the platform’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov claimed that the app’s global access was being compromised via BGP hijacking.Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking is an advanced cyber-tactical event in which internet traffic is maliciously or accidentally misdirected. This happens when a network operator falsely advertises IP address space that it does not own, confusing the internet’s global routing directory.The global internet is partitioned into thousands of massive, independent network blocks called Autonomous Systems (AS) run by telecom operators, ISPs, and cloud providers. Each AS uses BGP to announce which IP addresses it can reach.The core infrastructure of the internet relies on implicit trust; networks generally accept these BGP routing paths as accurate reflections of the best map routes.During a hijack, a rogue or misconfigured Autonomous System broadcasts a fraudulent routing announcement claiming it has the shortest, most efficient path to a target service’s IP addresses.
