UPDATE: This is Old News – YouTube Censorship Brought to You by Pakistan?

UPDATE: The article I reported on is old news and does not apply to the YouTube outage event which occurred on 08/16/2018. Sorry, my bad!

According to an ABC News article, the cause of the latest YouTube outage was an effort to block the video hosting platform because of a trailer for a film by Geert Wilders, a Dutch Lawmaker. The trailer is said to convey that Islam is a fascist theocracy that incites violence against gays and women.

A Pakistan telecom hijacked the route to YouTube redirecting the traffic into a memory hole if you will, this blocked Pakistanis from accessing the popular video site. In addition, the “mistake” which caused the censorship of YouTube to echo throughout the Worldwide Web was when the Telecom wrongfully published the changes to a Hong Kong international data carrier.

When PCCW Ltd, one of the world’s largest data carriers accepted the request in error, others also accepted the change without trying to verify the authenticity of the “updated” routing table. As of now, there doesn’t appear to be any mechanisms in place to prevent this from happening again.

One can only speculate what kind of chaos would ensue if the same technique was used by a bad actor to target domains critical to the national infrastructure. I don’t know how much, or if this has anything to do with the US transferring control of the DNS to ICANN. Yet if related, someone must have failed to imagine what could go wrong.