Routing security incidents happen – for many network operators probably at least once a month, and probably close to 5% of those incidents have real (and negative) network impacts. And though overall the routing system tends to be pretty quiet, some networks have really bad days sometimes. These are some of the results from the Routing Resilience Survey Report from our pilot project to analyze routing security incidents and their real-world impacts.
At the end of 2013 we launched, in partnership with BGPmon, a pilot project called the Routing Resilience Survey. As explained in a November 2013 blog post announcing the project, the effort was focused on collecting incident data related to routing resilience from operators’ points of view. This approach allowed us not only to filter out false positives – for instance, legitimate configuration changes – but also to record the impact and severity of the incidents.
Full study findings are presented in this report.