Well it is indeed a big hole in security, maybe not the biggest but we’ll run with it. Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like America’s NSA.
The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.
The method conceivably could be used for corporate espionage, nation-state spying or even by intelligence agencies looking to mine internet data without needing the cooperation of ISPs.
This type of attack known as man-in-the-middle exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper’s network.
Wired explains the security hole as follows:
The issue exists because BGP’s architecture is based on trust. To make it easy, say, for e-mail from Sprint customers in California to reach Telefonica customers in Spain, networks for these companies and others communicate through BGP routers to indicate when they’re the quickest, most efficient route for the data to reach its destination. But BGP assumes that when a router says it’s the best path, it’s telling the truth. That gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending them traffic.
Here’s how it works. When a user types a website name into his browser or clicks "send" to launch an e-mail, a Domain Name System server produces an IP address for the destination. A router belonging to the user’s ISP then consults a BGP table for the best route. That table is built from announcements, or "advertisements," issued by ISPs and other networks — also known as Autonomous Systems, or ASes — declaring the range of IP addresses, or IP prefixes, to which they’ll deliver traffic.
The routing table searches for the destination IP address among those prefixes. If two ASes deliver to the address, the one with the more specific prefix "wins" the traffic. For example, one AS may advertise that it delivers to a group of 90,000 IP addresses, while another delivers to a subset of 24,000 of those addresses. If the destination IP address falls within both announcements, BGP will send data to the narrower, more specific one.
To intercept data, an eavesdropper would advertise a range of IP addresses he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other networks. The advertisement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide, before data headed to those addresses would begin arriving to his network.
The attack is called an IP hijack and, on its face, isn’t new.
Alex Pilosov and Anton "Tony" Kapela the two men who brought this news to the masses are looking at solutions in cooperation with security agencies and other expert groups. However Douglas Maughan, cybersecurity research program manager for the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, has helped fund research to resolve the BGP issue, But has had little luck convincing ISPs and router vendors to take steps to secure BGP.
Tony Kapela states;
"Providers can prevent our attack absolutely 100 percent, They simply don’t because it takes work, and to do sufficient filtering to prevent these kinds of attacks on a global scale is cost prohibitive."
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I have not talked about this guy on my blog before. I have mentioned him on Twitter a number of times and I know 
). Since then he’s gone from that to being a CEO of a new startup and and evangelist for qik.com all while still continuing with his podcast.