Breaking the law: How 8chan (or “8kun”) got (briefly) back online

Enlarge / Snek goes dark. (credit: Getty Images)

The successor to 8chan, 8kun, made a somewhat brief appearance on the public Internet thanks to what amounts to an attack on the Internet's routing infrastructure. The site's domain name server, hosted by a service called VanwaNet, offered up an Internet address for the site that was from an unallocated set of addresses belonging to the RIPE Network Coordinating Centre, the regional Internet registry authority for Europe and the Middle East. And the host for the new site, the Russian hosting company Media Land LLC, advertised a route to that address to the rest of the Internet, allowing visitors to reach the site for a while.

The advertisement of the address, made with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is what is referred to in the routing world as a "bogon" or "martian." Usually these happen when private network addresses mistakenly are sent out, or "advertised," from a network to the rest of the Internet because of a router misconfiguration.

But sometimes, they hijack existing addresses either accidentally or maliciously. A BGP "leak" in November 2018 caused Google and Spotify service outages. In 2015, for example, Hacking Team used a BGP bogon advertisement to help Italian police regain control of infrastructure used to monitor hacked targets. And a Russian network provider made BGP advertisements that hijacked traffic to financial services sites in 2017.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments