How 3ve’s BGP hijackers eluded the Internet—and made $29M

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Getty)
Over the past decade, many attackers have exploited design weaknesses in the Internet’s global routing system. Most commonly, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is abused to divert gigabytes, or possibly even petabytes, of high-value traffic to ISPs inside Russia or China, sometimes for years at a time, so that the data can be analyzed or manipulated. Other times, attackers have used BGP hijackings more surgically to achieve specific aims, such as stealing cryptocurrency or regaining control of computers monitored in a police investigation.
Late last month came word of a new scheme. In one of the most sophisticated uses of BGP hijacking yet, criminals used the technique to generate $29 million in fraudulent ad revenue, in part by taking control of IP addresses belonging to the US Air Force and other reputable organizations.
In all, '3ve,' as researchers dubbed the ad fraud gang, used BGP attacks to hijack more than 1.5 million IP addresses over a 12-month span beginning in April 2017. The hijacking was notable for the precision and sophistication of the attackers, who clearly had experience with BGP—and a huge amount of patience.
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