Summarizer

> When BGP traffic is being sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you control point C, even for a few hours, you can theoretically collect vast amounts of intelligence that would be very useful for government entities. The CANTV AS8048 being prepended to the AS path 10 times means there the traffic would not prioritize this route through AS8048, perhaps that was the goal? AS prepending is a relatively common method of traffic engineering to reduce traffic from a peer/provider. Looking at CANTV's (AS8048) announcements from outside that period shows they do this a lot. Since this was detected as a BGP route leak, it looks like CANTV (AS8048) propagated routes from Telecom Italia Sparkle (AS6762) to GlobeNet Cabos Sumarinos Columbia (AS52320). This could have simply been a misconfiguration. Nothing nefarious immediately jumps out to me here. I don't see any obvious attempts to hijack routes to Dayco Telecom (AS21980), which was the actual destination. The prepending would have made traffic less likely to transit over CANTV assuming there was any other route available. The prepending done by CANTV does make it slightly easier to hijack traffic destined to it (though not really to Dayco), but that just appears to be something they just normally do. This could be CANTV trying to force some users of GlobeNet to transit over them to Dayco I suppose, but leaving the prepending in would be an odd way of going about it. I suppose if you absolutely knew you were the shortest path length, there's no reason to remove the prepending, but a misconfiguration is usually the cause of these things.

What would be the result of this? I think it would route data through Sparkle as a way of potentially spying on internet traffic without having compromised the network equipment within Venezuela, but I'm not familiar enough with network architecture to really understand what happened.

I wonder if this can be monitored on a global scale as a sort of predictor of “something gonna happen at country X”.

Solid OSINT methodology here. The 10x AS path prepending is the most interesting detail to me b/c typically you'd see prepending used to de-prioritize a route, which raises the question: was this about making traffic avoid CANTV, or was it a side effect of something else? A few thoughts: - The affected prefixes (200.74.224.0/20 block → Dayco Telecom) hosting banks and ISPs feels significant. If you're doing pre-kinetic intelligence gathering, knowing the exact network topology and traffic patterns of critical infrastructure would be valuable. Even a few hours of passive collection through a controlled transit point could map out dependencies you'd want to understand before cutting power. - What's also notable is the transit path through Sparkle, which the author points out doesn't implement RPKI filtering. That's not an accident if you're planning something (you'd specifically choose providers with weaker validation). - The article stops short of drawing conclusions, which is the right call. BGP anomalies are common enough that correlation ≠ causation. But the timing and the specific infrastructure affected make this worth deeper analysis. Would love to see someone with access to more complete BGP table dumps do a before/after comparison of routing stability for Venezuelan prefixes in that window.