YouTube Shut Down

How Good Is Your Security???
Google woke up one morning to discover they had lost their newly acquired Company, YouTube

By de Andréa

Yes it seems that one can loose an entire corporation over night. It simply vanished into thin air.

Well not quite, but nevertheless Google couldn’t even access their own Company YouTube on line, this all because the Nation of Islam had shut it down. Yes the Pakistani government didn’t like a video that was posted on the web site so it simply shut it down, not just the posting, the whole site...

One might wonder just how our enemy the Nation of Islam can shut down entire web sites in the U.S. or as in this case all over the world.

Well, Brad Andriese, a computer I.T. manager guru of Davis Interments Corp. in California, explains just how this fiasco was pulled off by the Muslim Pakistani Government, he said. “Thought you might get a kick out of this one. Google's YouTube service had a major outage over the weekend.

Apparently there was a video on YouTube that was negative about Muslims (the one made by the Dutch guy) that the Pakistan government didn't like. So it instructed its ISPs to block YouTube at the router level using BGP.

This would prevent anyone in Pakistan from using YouTube. That's their choice right? But, BGP is a protocol used by routers to determine the best route to a particular destination. Typically, routers share BGP data, and that's where the bigger problem comes in.

Mistakenly (or not), Pakistani ISP's shared the (null route) YouTube BGP (high priority) policy with routers in Hong Kong who shared it with the rest of the world (as they normally would)

A small ISP in San Francisco first noticed the problem, and called Google. Google was confused because their technicians couldn't even get to their own web site. It took hours to track the problem down. ....and the industry discovers yet another security problem, this time initiated by a foreign government, interesting. “

Brad Andriese

THE BOTTOM LINE: I wonder if Ahmadinejad just didn’t like the fact that the U.S. was trying to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Could he just use this BGP or some other protocol to shut down our Government? Or at least our military computerized communication system?

One thing for sure, this certainly is a new kind of war.

I wonder if we are prepared for it...

de Andréa