INTERVIEW: How to destroy the Internet with Danny McPherson

Presented by

In this interview Risky Business spoke to Arbor Networks' Chief Research Officer, Danny McPherson. Danny also serves on the MPLScon Advisory Board, the FCC's Network Reliability and Interoperability Council (NRIC) and is active in the network and security operations and research communities. He's a bizarre hybrid -- a twisted split between a security guy and a network guy!

In February Danny enjoyed a 15 minutes of fame of sorts when he blogged about a snafu at a Pakistani ISP that saw YouTube knocked offline for two hours.

Globally.

The Pakistani ISP had been asked by the government to block YouTube. An admin decided to blackhole it with a BGP announce. Unfortunately, routers upstream from the pakistani ISP swallowed the BGP announce as well, and the whole thing propagated around the world until YouTube was completely offline.

So in this interview I spoke to Danny about the Internet as critical infrastructure -- as you'll hear, he believes the way the internet address space is configured gives the bad guys a little wiggle room when it comes to routing attacks.