Telegram was hijacked by the Iranian state-owned telecommunications company. This action appeared to be a BGP hijacking, that is, an intermediary illegally controlled the IP address group, and the original data line was changed.
The attack was confirmed by multiple Internet tests such as Oracle Internet intelligence map and Cisco’s BGPMon. On the night of the BGP hijacking incident, the Iranian Minister of Information and Communication Technology confirmed the report on Twitter. He said: “in the event of an error, whether inadvertent or intentional, the Telecommunication Company of Iran will be severely penalized.”
Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey, believes that once a government controls the entire network, BGP becomes vulnerable at the national network boundary. Woodward adds that organisations that have hijacked data in this way have not found useful technology to stop such attacks.
The current investigation into this matter is underway. Hijacking BGP is a common strategy used by cybercriminals to achieve economic ransomware, monitoring and censorship.
Woodward said “By diverting traffic like this, you can obviously then try to intercept it or you can simply block it. For example, if you know the destination of data you can simply redirect it at the border of your country. It’s an effective way of stopping people in the country from using the app.”