A closer look at a BGP anomaly in Venezuela

Nature of the Venezuela BGP incident

• Many commenters say the Cloudflare post makes a strong case this was a misconfiguration, not an attack.
• AS-path prepending (making routes less attractive) is repeatedly cited as evidence against an intentional MITM: an attacker would normally want shorter paths.
• Several mention that similar leaks from the same Venezuelan AS have occurred before, supporting the “fat finger + bad filters” theory.
• Others argue that state or non-state actors could still do sophisticated path games, and that BGP’s trust model remains fundamentally fragile.

How common are BGP leaks?

• Network operators report seeing BGP leaks affect their companies multiple times over a few years, even with relatively stable routing.
• Links to MANRS and Cloudflare Radar are shared as sources tracking leak and hijack events globally.
• There’s interest in heuristics for distinguishing: intentional change vs accidental leak vs structural failure, and in using AS-path patterns, regional visibility, and “who benefits” analysis.

Trust in US companies and governments

• A large subthread is about loss of trust in US-based infrastructure providers, especially given intelligence and military history.
• Some say even if Cloudflare’s analysis is technically solid, they would not trust any US firm to publicly expose US government operations if those existed.
• Others counter that the article is straightforward, uses public data, and that presuming hidden US influence here is unwarranted paranoia.

Geopolitics: US–EU, Venezuela, China

• Heated discussion on whether the US is now effectively an “enemy” of the EU, citing energy politics, sanctions, Greenland rhetoric, and military threats.
• Some argue the US pushes an artificial “choose US or China” framing; many express preference for a genuinely multipolar order.
• Sanctions vs internal mismanagement in Venezuela are debated; timelines of decline and responsibility are contested and remain unresolved.

Centralization, Cloudflare, and blocking issues

• Cloudflare’s global visibility and anycast footprint are admired technically but also seen as unhealthy concentration of power.
• Users share experiences of being wrongly blocked by Cloudflare’s protections, and frustrations that defenses against scrapers can harm legitimate access.
• Others note that similar analysis can be done without Cloudflare, using public collectors like RIPE RIS.

Surveillance and lawful interception

• Multiple comments remind readers that large-scale traffic interception capabilities (DPI, backbone taps, data centers storing encrypted traffic) are widespread and long-standing.
• There is discussion of how TLS can be defeated in practice (where it terminates, access to keys, VM memory, legal compulsion), and that true end-to-end security often isn’t deployed.
• Some suggest focusing on making network-layer attacks affect only performance/availability by strengthening encryption, DNSSEC, DANE, MTA-STS, and certificate transparency use.