One of my favorite late night hobbies is watching @bgpstream and @bgpmon. They offer great insight to the duct tape behind the scenes of the internet. While yesterday’s Google ‘oops’ was high impact, obvious fat fingers happen all the time, propagating in weird ways.
I’m regularly surprised by security folks who are so intimidated by BGP they refuse to try to learn it. While a lot of attention has been paid to DNS, BGP is still on of the most critical legacy components of how the internet functions.
At a bare minimum, you should absolutely know what / whose ASN your public IP space is in, and if you own your own, you should know the numbers by heart and monitor then like you do your IP space.
I’ve always loved that @sans_isc has an AS lookup option on their site. isc.sans.edu/asreport.html
If you’re really having trouble grasping BGP, try think of it organically instead of technically.
This goes for a lot of the way the internet functions at scale - if the sheer engineering is daunting, step back and look at it as an organism. They are both valid ways to visualize the mathematics.
