Aussie telco Telstra says soz after accidentally diverting traffic meant for encrypted email biz through its servers

Aussie telco Telstra has apologised after a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing oddity caused traffic destined for encrypted email service ProtonMail to wrongly pass through Telstra's servers. Switzerland-headquartered ProtonMail raged in a blog post that Telstra had engaged in "BGP hijacking" through what it described as " …

[williamsth]

"Due to a technical error".

No

"Due to a user error and an error in our standard operating procedure that allowed for such error"

There we go, fixed it for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse

"... running post verification testing to address an unrelated software bug ..."

Not 'testing' but rather a workaround code that attempts to rewrite generated bad input data to fix/correct it? And there was a bug in the bug fix? Who'd they think they were, Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shrill

Proton Mail's newish s.o.p. Almost makes me want to side with Telstra.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Shrill

Telstra#s SOP is SNAFU.

You can recreate the Telstra experience with any other telco vendor by NOT ordering a service through the alternate vendor and then complaining when its never delivered.

[IGotOut]

Re: Shrill

So an email (and other secure services) company complains that an ISP redirects all their traffic....and they are in the wrong for complaining?

What a strange planet you inhabit.

[Natalie Gritpants Jr]

It's an encrypted email service

So even if the packets go to an adversary they shouldn't be able to read the contents. Really for Proton it's just an accidental DOS, probably no worse than a sheared cable.

[jsa]

Re: It's an encrypted email service

In theory, yes, but if the sender doesn't encrypt it in the first place there's not much anyone else can do about that. Fortunately though I believe most popular email providers do use SSL if the recipient's provider supports it.

[pmb00cs]

Re: It's an encrypted email service

Having run my own email servers, with opportunistic encryption enabled for both sending and receiving, you appear to have more faith in the state of the global email system than I.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's an encrypted email service

It comes down to multiple issues:

- routing the traffic through Australia likely leads to performance issues due to increased latency

- was the traffic routed accidentally or on behalf of smeone else?

- encryption doesn't guarantee that information cannot be read. Just that it is likely to be difficult to decrypt by a casual attacker or difficult to decrypt within a set time for a determined, well resourced attacker.