On Monday, several Google services such as cloud and search services were disrupted when an internet diversion that rerouted internet traffic through China and Russia took place. According to the reports, the service interruptions continued for oddly two hours, which ended at 5:30 pm. Google underscoring the matter, admitted the service interruption on a network status page and believed that the cause was external to Google. The company did added a very little in the comment. The method that was undertaken by the hijackers were known as gateway protocol hijacking and it has the ability to turn off all the important services and pave way for financial theft and espionage. As of now, the 94% of the Google services is encrypted. This makes the services more secured and protected.
On Monday, Alex henthon Iwane, who is an executive at the network- intelligence company called ThousandEyes, said that this incident is most likely to be worst hit that the Google has seen till date. According to him, nation-state involvement was the main reason this incident as major traffic was landing at China telecom which is run by state. There is a little one can do if it is a nation-state or someone who has contact to a key internet provider chooses to reroute the traffic.
Henthron-Iwane stressing on the incident says that the hijacking might be an experiment to something big. Recently, rerouting has significantly affected financial site. For instance, in 2017, one of such incident affected Visa and Mastercard’s websites. In the month of April, such hijacking caused crypto currency theft.
