Internet management project disrupts traffic
An experiment run by Duke University and a European group responsible for managing internet resources went wrong on Friday, disrupting a small percentage of net traffic.
The damage could have been far worse however, and the incident shows just how fragile one of the internet's core protocols really is, security experts say.
The problem started just before 9am Greenwich Mean Time Friday and lasted less than half an hour. It was kicked off when RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) and Duke ran an experiment that involved the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used by routers to know where to send their traffic on the internet. RIPE started announcing BGP routes that were configured a little differently from normal because they used an experimental data format. RIPE's data was soon passed from router to router on the internet, and within minutes it became clear that this was causing problems.
