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BGP Hijack

Rerouting internet traffic by falsely announcing IP routes, a network-layer attack that sits below DNS.

FBFenwei BianAuthorVZVictor ZhouEditorJune 22, 2026
  • glossary

BGP hijack (Border Gateway Protocol hijacking) is a network-layer attack in which a malicious or misconfigured autonomous system broadcasts false routing announcements, convincing other routers on the internet to send traffic destined for a legitimate IP address through the attacker's infrastructure instead. Unlike DNS hijacking — which corrupts name-to-IP mappings — a BGP hijack operates at the routing layer, so the domain's DNS records remain untouched and DNSSEC provides no protection against it. Once traffic is rerouted, attackers can intercept TLS certificate issuance (BGP hijacks have been used to obtain fraudulent certificates from CAs that use HTTP-based domain validation), read unencrypted traffic, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks. Mitigations include route-origin validation via RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure) and monitoring services that alert when unexpected ASes announce your prefixes.

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Contributors

Fenwei Bian

Software Developer & Writer • Namefi
Author

Fenwei Bian is a software developer in her thirties who spends her working hours in pull requests and her weekends with her hands in soil or sawdust. Years of open source on GitHub taught her that names are interfaces: a good one is clear, honest about what it does, and kind to whoever has to use it next.

She gardens because it rewards patience and punishes wishful thinking, and she does woodwork because a joint either fits or it doesn't. Both habits show up in how she writes about naming — measure twice, check the source, and don't sand over a rough spot and hope no one notices.

For Namefi she writes about how domain markets actually move, the practical trade-offs of tokenizing and flipping names, and picking a domain you'll still be glad you own in twenty years.

GitHub

Victor Zhou

Founder & Standards Editor • Namefi
Editor

Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.

His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.

For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.

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