A censor is haunting Asia—the censor of superbigcocks.com.
According to The Verge, overzealous Iranian officials accidentally blocked that porn site and 255 others across the continent last week by abusing a core internet protocol known as BGP.
On Thursday, those pages started coming up blank for customers of major ISPs in Russia, India, Hong Kong and Indonesia, the result of bad networking routes originating in Iran. Rather than simply blocking domestic ISPs from accessing the domains, Iran began announcing fake routes to them via BGP—which soon spread to neighboring countries.
A little over a day later, networks began blocking the bad routes, The Verge reports. The incident, however, highlights a core vulnerability of an internet based heavily on mutual trust.
As BGP is effectively managed by the honor system (any network can announce routes), it is particularly susceptible to misuse. In 2014, for example, Turkish ISPs used false BGP routes to pose as the free DNS services citizens were using to access censored social media sites—just days before a national election.
