Atlantic Council urges private-sector BGP, DNS fixes
A report argues US private industry's outsized control over Internet infrastructure leaves BGP and DNS chronically insecure and calls for government incentives to fix it.
This Atlantic Council report is a policy analysis rather than an incident report, examining how private companies—ISPs, CDNs, and cloud providers—shape the Internet's topology and protocols, particularly the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and the Domain Name System (DNS). It argues these foundational protocols were designed for interoperability and resilience rather than security, leaving them chronically vulnerable to misconfiguration, route leaks, and hijacking, and that private firms with the greatest influence over this infrastructure are not maximally using that leverage to improve security.
The report cites concrete historical examples to illustrate real-world impact: a 2018-2019 Iranian-linked campaign (referred to by researchers as Sea Turtle) that hijacked DNS servers across multiple countries to steal credentials and information, and a June 2019 Verizon BGP route leak that propagated bad routing information and caused a cascading outage affecting Amazon, Cloudflare, and other major Internet companies. These cases underscore NIST's characterization of BGP hijacking as one of the greatest current threats to the Internet.
The report closes with policy recommendations for the US government: embedding Internet protocol security best practices into federal procurement, mandating protections for federal agencies, convening public-private dialogues on threat data sharing, and reinvesting in cyber diplomacy to establish international norms against attacks on core Internet infrastructure. This is fundamentally a governance and policy piece rather than a technical incident report, with no active exploitation, malware, or specific IOCs described.
Mentioned in this report
Source reporting: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/the-politics-of-internet-security-private-industry-and-the-future-of-the-web
This is the public brief
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