Routing on The Internet: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

"The Internet's leading architects have considered the rapid growth and fragmentation of core routing tables one of the most significant threats to the long-term stability and scalability of the Internet

"It has been reported that in April 2010, about 15% of the world's Internet traffic was hijacked by a set of servers owned by China Telecom. Popular websites such as dell.com, cnn.com and amazon.de were "re-routed" through Chinese networks before reaching their destinations for about 18 minutes, until technicians restored the correct parameters. In the technical world, this is typically called a prefix hijack and it happened due to a couple of wrong tweaks made at China Telecom. Whether this was intentional or not is unknown, but such routing accidents are all too common online.

"Dangers of Internet Routing Methods

"The "Inter" in Internet denotes the fact that it is actually a network comprised of thousands of interconnected networks, each of which is generally managed by a different entity. While packets of your requests to access information (such as DNS queries) traverse many networks, including ISPs, top-level domain name servers, and even the Root, a single type of hardware is used at every layer in this exchange process – a router."

Complete Story

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