YouTube Outage Emphasizes Internet Flaw

Yesterday's report of YouTube's outage uncovers a serious internet flaw. The disruption of YouTube services Sunday brings serious questions to the table as to how vulnerable internet services are. According to network experts, the flaw uncovered due to YouTube's outage may lead to a serious security problem.

In techie terms, the issue is underlying in the way Internet Service Providers (ISPs) share routing information called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This is a standard protocol used by routers so that computers on the internet can be found. The ISPs share this information with one another and when one ISP has the bad batch of information it is shared with the rest of the internet.

In non-techie terms, you can think of this incident as spreading a rumor at that office. One person tells another, then the other person tells yet another and then by the end of the day the information has been twisted and construed. With the YouTube incident, the BGP data was only intended to block access to YouTube inside of Pakistan and not other sources. The information was accidently transmitted to other ISPs causing a much bigger widespread outage of the YouTube service.

The origination of the outage as reported yesterday, came about due to an alleged anti-Islamic video hosted on YouTube. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered the blocking of ISPs accessing YouTube.

If hackers gain the ability to spread this type of bad rerouting data such as in the YouTube outage, they could cause serious damage on the internet. This highlights a serious internet flaw and vulnerability. The information spread from ISPs must be monitored or intercepted in order to limit such an attack. Several protocols could have been put into motion to prevent the widespread outage for the YouTube services. In the end of any situation on the internet such as the YouTube incident, the culprits are usually identified but only after the damage has been done. This uncovers yet another secrete about the internet and the discovery of more security issues.