Russia tried to hijack Apple’s internet traffic?

Would this have only affected Russian users trying to contact Apple services? And what could have been the the purpose of this, i.e., what would it have enabled Russia to accomplish if the redirect were successful?
 
theorist9 said:
Would this have only affected Russian users trying to contact Apple services? And what could have been the the purpose of this, i.e., what would it have enabled Russia to accomplish if the redirect were successful?
Click to expand...
No idea, but presumably it would have affected mostly Russian users since the rest of us probably
Don’t have any Russian servers in our routing paths on the first place.
 
Cmaier said:
No idea, but presumably it would have affected mostly Russian users since the rest of us probably
Don’t have any Russian servers in our routing paths on the first place.
Click to expand...

The problem as I understand it is that the internet (still) uses a set of global routing tables. And it’s completely possible to poison these and get all the traffic meant for a particular IP range sent to a chosen destination instead of where it is meant to go.

Just like an ISP needs to be able to tell the whole internet how to route packets meant for it, an ISP can also lie to the whole internet and hijack parts of someone else’s IP range through the same mechanism. It’s a bit like sending a fraudulent change of address notice to the USPS for a whole zip code at once.
 

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