Is Your Internet Provider Keeping You Safe?

Is Your Internet Provider Keeping You Safe?

In terms of internet security, we often think of what we as individuals can do, like good password security or not opening email attachments. Or what companies who hold our data can do, like notifying us of a breach or having their own measures in place to avoid one in the first place. When it comes to our internet providers, we often think about the internet speeds they provide us and having consistent uptime.

What about security though? What measures are in places (or not) to keep us safe while using the very thing that connects us all together?

At the beginning of April, sites like Facebook and Google came to a grinding halt for hours. It wasn’t a hack or a bug, it was a problem with the internet data routing standard known as Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP.

BGP disruptions usually happen by accident, but they can also be caused by large-scale spying or data interception. Denial of service attacks can be another culprit.

BGP is like the map the internet uses to connect everything. All our traffic is routed through gateways to various hubs around the world. Or it should be that straightforward. In reality, every ISP provider can decide which routes to take, and not all of them are good.

Cloudflare, who specializes in Internet Security among other things, has launched the website ISBGPSafeYet. Using this website will test your ISP by offering a legitimate route and an invalid route to load two pages.

If it catches the invalid route and only loads the page offered by the legitimate route, then your ISP has BGP protections in place. If it loads both they fail.

While we can’t change the problems with BGP overnight, public awareness is always a good thing. If your ISP fails the test, reach out to them and give them your opinion! Together we can make the internet a safer place for us all to use.

This article was powered by Valley TechLogic, an IT provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/valleytechlogic.