US Payment Processing Services Targeted By BGP Hijacking Attacks
Three United States payment processing companies were reportedly targeted by Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking attacks on their DNS servers in July.
BGP is a key protocol used for routing internet traffic around the world. The security of the internet as a whole depends on routing security, making BGP one of the major security issues; however, security was not built into BGP, which is decades old.
These Internet routing attacks were designed to redirect traffic directed at the payment processors to servers controlled by malicious actors, who would then attempt to steal the data.
The affected vendors have not commented so far, and there is no information on what, if any, data was compromised.
In April 2018, a similar attack affected traffic to and from Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service and allowed traffic directed at MyEtherWallet to be redirected to a fake version of the site hosted in Russia. The attack, featured in NCSC Threat Report on 4 May which saw hackers steal $160,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
Duncan is a technology professional with over 20 years experience of working in various IT roles. He has a interest in cyber security, and has a wide range of other skills in radio, electronics and telecommunications.