Egypt Withdraws its BGP Peering- Blackholes Self From Internet

Back when I worked for Homeland Security, I learned a shocking reality of how the Internet really works. The Internet is not about DDoS attacks, vulnerabilities or hackers. Its all about the Autonomous System Number Owners- ASN’s and their cowboy owners who control which networks get to stay on the Internet and who doesn’t.

You see, if someone sets up a large network full of criminal organizations, who set malware traps to commit crimes, its not the US, European or laughably, the United Nations that puts a stop to the criminal activity- Its the ASN owners, who usually each know each other professionally and personally, who put a stop to the criminal activity by simply refusing to route traffic to the offensive ASN’s. You see, no traffic flows across the internet without the permission of these elite cyber security professionals. You get wildly out of line and you get “de-peered.” No one will route your IP address ranges to you.

For the first time in the history of the Internet, a country has de-peered themselves and their ASN’s from the rest of the Internet. Banks, shopping, email, standard communications, and the entire national economy of Egypt is now blackholed to the rest of the world.

From Renesys here, by way of Brian Krebs:

in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up.

In the meantime, citizens are still standing strong against a crackdown against them by a government which seems to be increasingly hostile against them.

I didn’t know what was going on, but Joe Biden said that Hosni Mubarak, the man in charge for 30 years in Egypt is not a dictator, which pretty much means he is… so I’m with the Egyptian people on this one.