Russia and China's 'attack on Google': Virtual wargame 'experiment' hits search giant
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Russia and China's 'attack on Google': Virtual wargame 'experiment' hits search giant
Google has been hit by the ‘worst ever’ internet hijack in the company’s history, security experts fear.
Information from Google searches, cloud-hosting services and the company’s bundle of collaboration tools for businesses – known as G Suite – were all affected.
The data of US users was intercepted by servers in Nigeria, China and Russia – including those run by major state-owned telecoms providers.
Security experts suggested the hack was a ‘wargame experiment’ – meaning it may prelude similar, more widescale attacks from the nations involved in future.
The type of traffic misdirection employed, known as border gateway protocol (BGP) hijacking, can knock essential services offline and facilitate espionage and financial theft.
It can result either from misconfiguration – human error, essentially – or from malicious action.
In two recent cases, such rerouting has affected financial sites.
In April 2017, a state-owned Russian Telecoms firm hijacked the traffic of MasterCard and Visa, allowing them enumerate who was initiating connections.
This past April, another hijacking enabled hackers to steal 2,000-worth (£118,000) of the cryptocurrency Ether from users of the website EtherWallet.com.
Google is downplaying Monday’s incident, saying it does not believe it was malicious.
The firm has yet to confirm the exact nature of the data affected, as well as how many users have been put at risk, with millions potentially in the firing line.
Google service interruptions lasted for nearly one and a half hours and ended about 10:30pm GMT (5:30pm EST), network service companies said.
People took to Twitter to vent their frustrations, with one user writing ‘I have no idea what to do with my life.’
This image shows an outage map of Google service in the US. Interruptions lasted for nearly one and a half hours and ended about 10:30pm GMT (5:30pm EST), network service companies said
Network intelligence company ThousandEyes uncovered the hijack.
Alex Henthorn-Iwane, an executive at ThousandEyes, called Monday’s incident the worst affecting Google that his San Francisco company has seen.
He said he suspected nation-state involvement because the traffic was effectively landing at state-run China Telecom.
http://celbestnews.com/world-news/russia-and-chinas-attack-on-google-virtual-wargame-experiment-hits-search-giant/