"A Quarter of World's Internet Users Rely on Infrastructure That Is Susceptible to Attack"
A large-scale study conducted by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego found that nearly a quarter of the world's Internet users reside in countries more vulnerable than previously thought to attacks on Internet infrastructure. Findings show that many of the at-risk countries are in the Global South. Alexander Gamero-Garrido, the paper's first author, said the team sought to investigate the Internet's topology in order to identify weak links that, if compromised, could expose an entire nation's traffic. The topology of the Internet can vary considerably around the globe. In developed countries such as the US, many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) compete to serve a large number of users. These networks are directly connected to each other and exchange content, a process called direct peering. All of the ISPs can also connect directly to the global Internet infrastructure. However, as Gamero-Garrido pointed out, a large portion of the Internet does not function with peering agreements for network connectivity. In countries that are still developing, most users rely on a handful of providers for Internet access, one of which serves an overwhelming majority of users. Furthermore, those providers rely on a small number of companies known as transit autonomous systems to access the global Internet and traffic from other countries. The researchers discovered that these transit autonomous system providers are often state-owned. Countries with this type of Internet infrastructure are particularly vulnerable to attacks because only a few transit autonomous systems have to be crippled. These countries are also vulnerable if the main ISP has an outage. This article continues to discuss findings from the study on quantifying nations' exposure to traffic observation and selective tampering.