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.

Was the OSRS economy affected by the strikes? I'm assuming they didn't disrupt internet access for most Venezuelan citizens but I have not looked into it yet.

There are other attack vectors beyond infrastructure though when the population all have Android Smart Phones running Play Services and communicate using WhatsApp.

If having nuclear weapons did anything at all to prevent cyber attacks, the US would not be getting constantly victimized by cyber attacks.

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.

Maybe there would be some benefit in just dropping some packets. For example to WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail servers. Could add a communication delay that could be critical and denies people a fairly reliable fallback communication method.

I wonder what kind of capabilities the US army didn't use during this operation.

What I mean is that cause and effect here could be different then the author thinks. We see some route changes, but those changes make no sense on their own since they wouldn't capture any traffic. That makes it more probable that BGP was not the attack, but that some other action caused this BGP anomalie as a side effect. For example, maybe some misconfiguration caused these routes to be published because another route was lost. Which could very well be the actual cyber attack, or the effect of jamming, or breaking some undersea cable, or turning off the power to some place.

I never understood the (now decade old) argument of 'parts of the Internet cannot be shut down' Clearly and empirically, BGP can shut off parts of the Internet, just as Trump wanted to do in 2015. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dear-donald-trump-no-you-1322...

Typical cyber warfare techniques.

Cyber-warfare capabilities on this level seem pretty horrific. What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike? That seems extremely disorientating. What if you could simply turn off the power grid indefinitely?

Russia attacks Ukrainian power grid on a weekly basis. Not only with cyber-attacks but with actual bombs. Over Christmas 750k homes in Kyiv were without power or heating. This is not a hypothetical it's daily reality for millions of people in Ukraine.

> What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike? I expect every major world power has a plan to (attempt to) do precisely that to their enemies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb > The US Navy used sea-launched Tomahawk missiles with Kit-2 warheads, involving reels of carbon fibers, in Iraq as part of Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War in 1991, where it disabled about 85% of the electricity supply. The US Air Force used the CBU-94, dropped by F-117 Nighthawks, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on 2 May 1999, where it disabled more than 70% national grid electricity supply. I would not, however, take "Trump said something" as indicative of much. "It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly" is both visibly untrue from the video evidence available, and is the precise sort of off-the-cuff low-fact statement he's prone to.

General Caine specifically said they utilized CYBERCOM (which is the US inter-branch hacking command) to pave the way for the special ops helicopters. I personally have no doubt that any (whether or not they all were) lights being out was due to a US hack. Some of the stuff that got blown up may well have been to prevent forensic recover of US tools and techniques.

I have no doubt they used cyberattacks and electronic warfare. Trump just seems the worst person in the world to play a game of telephone with on such a subject. For example: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2025/05/16/pentagon-silent-a... > “The F-35, we’re doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade,” Trump said. “But we’re also doing an F-55, I’m going to call it an F-55. And that’s going to be a substantial upgrade. But it’s going to be also with two engines.” > Frank Kendall, the secretary of the Air Force during former President Joe Biden’s administration, said in an interview with Defense News that it is unclear what Trump was referring to when he discussed an “F-22 Super,” but it may have been a reference to the F-47 sixth-generation fighter jet… Kendall said it is also unclear what Trump was referring to when he discussed the alleged F-55.

Something like this more or less happened during the initial Israeli strike on Iran ? From what I remember reading, they were able to gain air dominance not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside, allowing the Israeli jets to annihilate them.

Read about Stuxnet

It's been well known to be a major part of world power war plans for like 20 years now. Yes, it's a terrifying concept.

Russia tried. They haven’t managed to do anything very serious.

I don't think calling shutting down the internet horrific is appropriate at all in the context of bombings.

Ridiculous post. Power outages would kill a lot of people if sustained. A Carrington event would devastate modern society.

We would then hack you.