(Phys.org) —Findings from Internet intelligence company Renesys sound an alert to a hijacking practice in the form of traffic misdirection on the Internet. A November 19 blog on the Renesys site has since caught the attention of a wider press: "Who is sending Internet traffic on long, strange trips?" asked a headline in The Christian Science Monitor earlier this month. The Renesys blog author, Jim Cowie, Chief Technology Officer, said that "We have actually observed live Man-In-the-Middle (MITM) hijacks on more than 60 days so far this year." He said about 1,500 individual IP blocks have been hijacked in events lasting from minutes to days by attackers working from various countries. Simply put, data to and from finance firms, net phone services and governments was re-routed in several attacks this year. As Michael Mimosa of Threatpost noted, "Attackers are accessing routers running on the border gateway protocol (BGP) and injecting additional hops that redirect large blocks of Internet traffic to locations where it can be monitored and even manipulated before being sent to its intended destination."
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