Google has reportedly been hit by a severe hijack that routed the servers to China, Nigeria, and Russia causing long downtimes for many users. Google services such as YouTube, Gmail, and other cloud services were affected due to the traffic diversion that the company doubted was malicious. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Google acknowledged the issue and released a fix at 2:35 pm PT on Monday (4:05 am, Tuesday IST) post which all the services were back up running “as expected”.
The internet hijack, which is termed as the ‘worst ever’ in the company’s history hit the Google services including the company’s corporate WAN infrastructure and VPN services. According to the report, the traffic diversion started when a Nigerian carrier MainOne wrongly declared that its servers were the right route to many IP addresses including those belonging to Google services. The malformed route was then received by China Telecom and disseminated to other servers worldwide. Russia’s Transtelecom and other major carriers picked up the incoming traffic from China and further re-routed the IP addresses.
Minutes after this happened, the same Nigerian telecom company again declared a wrong system that redirected the IP addresses from Cloudflare, a company that is in partnership with Google for firewall and online protection services. Meanwhile, all the Google and Cloudflare services suffered long downtimes, rendering many users affected. According to network research firm ThousandEyes, as many as 180 IP prefixes were impacted by the unfortunate interception by foreign servers, including China that is feared by most US analysts to have been keeping a surveilling the Internet in the country.
Google posted a public notice on its website later to address the issue and the steps it took to allay the situation. It said that the route interception didn’t look malicious. It also said that no data was compromised. However, security experts believe this could be a ‘wargame experiment’, which means that this could be a kind of an attack that precedes a bigger, more dangerous attacks from the same nations.
