[ RECORD YEAR ]2018

Amazon Route 53 BGP Hijack for Cryptocurrency Theft

Attackers announced rogue BGP routes for Amazon Route 53 IP prefixes through Russian and Nigerian ISP transit, hijacking DNS traffic for MyEtherWallet to steal $150,000 in cryptocurrency.

THREAT SEVERITY
9.3 / 10
Target TechnologyBGP-4 (RFC 4271), Authoritative DNS Resolvers, AS10297
OSI Network LayerLayer 3 / BGP Inter-Domain Routing
Threat Actor / AttributionCryptocurrency Cybercrime Actors
Protocol StandardRFC 4271 (BGP-4) / RFC 1035 (DNS)

01Video Presentation & Conference Keynote

02Deep-Dive Technical Analysis

Attackers configured e-spen (AS10297) to announce unauthorized /24 prefixes for Amazon Route 53 authoritative nameservers (`205.251.192.0/24` to `205.251.197.0/24`). Transit provider MainOne (AS37282) propagated the announcement to Equinix and Hurricane Electric, attracting global DNS traffic to rogue servers serving spoofed MyEtherWallet TLS certificates for two hours.

03Vulnerability & Exploit Flow

Exploit Vector

BGP prefix hijacking of authoritative DNS resolver IP ranges.

04Recommended Defense & Mitigation Protocol

Operator Hardening Strategy

Enforce RPKI Route Origin Validation (ROV) and strict BGP ingress prefix filtering (MANRS compliance).

05Security Impact & Geopolitical Consequence

Exposed the critical vulnerability of global internet and cloud DNS resolution to unvalidated BGP route announcements, accelerating international RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure) Route Origin Authorization (ROA) enforcement.

06Authoritative Standards & External References

07Related Topic Cluster Records

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