Η Google was hit last Monday by the worst cyber attack in its history, according to security experts, and it even affected searches made by users on Google and the company's Cloud where users' data is stored.
Data belonging to users around the world has been compromised by servers in Nigeria, China and Russia, with cybersecurity experts pointing out that the attack was a "war experiment" and that similar attacks are expected to happen again. in the future.
Many users around the world reported on social media that Google's services were not working and it was finally revealed that the whole upset was caused by three companies, China Telecom of China, Trans Telecom of Russia and ISP MainOne based in the west. Africa.
These companies are telecommunications companies and have been involved in various similar incidents in the past with China Telecom taking the lead.
Google "downgraded" the incident by saying it did not expect it to be malicious and allayed users' fears by not telling them that their accounts had been leaked. The company found itself in quite a difficult position as there were leaks of accounts on the internet, including the fact that something similar had happened last month that resulted in the "air" being found in the personal information of more than 500.000 people who had Google +.
This cyberattack, also known as BGP (border gateway protocol) can throw many services offline and even lead to financial fraud and can be caused either by incorrect network configuration or by malicious actions.
In these two recent attacks, even financial sites were affected, from which the personal data of users were found exposed to various hackers, with the recent past showing that many hackers benefited financially from other similar attacks.
The Google service shutdown lasted for about 1.5 hours and the company that first discovered the attack was ThousandEyes, a network information company. An employee of the company revealed that it was one of the worst attacks, while a recent investigation showed that China regularly conducts cyber hijackings.
According to Research University professor Alan Woodward, the attack was a means of monitoring both Russia and China gaining access to various Google services. He went on to say that while online messages are decrypted, such attacks can bring to light other types of information such as who spoke to whom, when, and even for how long the conversation lasted, which is very useful for tracking companies, especially foreign countries.
MainOne from Africa denied any reports of a cyber attack on Twitter, attributing the whole situation to an error during the process of a planned upgrade of its internet via BGP filters, and typically stating that the error was corrected within 74 minutes. However, this excuse did not "convince" Yuval Shavitt, a security researcher at Tel Aviv University, who argued that Monday's incident was not a mere incident, despite MainOne's claims. The professor also attributed a share of responsibility to China as, as he said, it is known for the number of attacks it has made in the past.
A Google spokesman told MailOnline: "We know that some of the web traffic was affected by the incorrect routing of IP addresses, and as a result, access to certain Google services was greatly affected."
Professor Woodward also said that this incident was most likely the result of human error. He went on to say that similar attacks used the pretext of the attack in order not to show that the reason for it was some wrong order from a person. Woodland did not fail to mention that a global cyber attack could be carried out by Russia or China just to see if these two countries could do such a thing, something like a kind of test. "We all rely on the internet in modern times, but why bomb other countries instead of violating their internet access? "It would all end in chaos," the professor told MailOnline.
In October, researchers reported that a Chinese Internet service company bypassed Internet traffic on a daily basis with Chris Demchak of Naval War College in the United States and Yuval Shavitt of Tel Aviv University discovering various attacks by China Telecom in recent years. In 2016, in particular, they found that China redirected the Internet between the Canadian and Toronto networks for six full months.
