BGP Anomalies During the Venezuelan Blackout: A Technical Deep Dive

The Low Orbit Security Radar has long catalogued offensive security events for practitioners. In this edition we analyze the seemingly routine BGP anomalies that surfaced during Venezuela’s January 2024 blackout. The timeline of political turmoil provides a backdrop for the technical investigation. ## 1. Background: BGP and Route Leaks Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the backbone of inter‑domain routing on the Internet. Each autonomous system (AS) announces a list of IP prefixes it can reach and the AS path through which traffic must travel. BGP prefers the shortest AS path, but operators can prepend their own AS number several times to influence inbound traffic. When a route that should be *non‑peering* is announced to other ASes, an *unintentional route leak* occurs, potentially exposing traffic to an unintended intermediary. ## 2. The January 2 Incident At 15:40 UTC on January 2, 2024, Cloudflare Radar flagged a BGP route leak involving AS8048 – the designation for Venezuela’s state‑owned telecom, CANTV. Public BGP dumps from the RIPE and RouteViews projects confirm that eight prefixes were announced with an AS path that repeated AS8048 ten times: ``` ASPATH: 263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980 ``` The repeated prepending is unusual because the BGP decision process disfavours longer paths. The apparent intent was to make traffic through AS8048 unattractive, potentially diverting traffic through an alternative route that was not announced by CANTV. The leaked prefixes all sit inside the 200.74.224.0/20 block, which WHOIS queries assign to Dayco Telecom – a significant hosting and telecommunications provider in Caracas. Reverse‑DNS lookups of these sub‑blocks reveal critical infrastructure such as banking servers, ISP endpoints, and corporate mail gateways. ## 3. Correlation with Political Events | Time (UTC) | Event | |-------------|-------| | Jan 2 15:40 | BGP route leak detected (Cloudflare Radar) | | Jan 3 06:00 | First explosions reported in Caracas (NPR) | | Jan 3 06:00 | US soldiers reach Maduro’s compound (NBC News) | | Jan 3 08:29 | Maduro aboard USS Iwo Jima (CNN) | The BGP activity predates the first reported explosions in Caracas by roughly a day. Military incursions that followed could have benefited from an alternate routing path that bypassed the state’s primary telecom infrastructure, facilitating either intelligence gathering or maintaining communications independent of government‑controlled networks. ## 4. Possible Motivations and Implications 1. **Stealthy Traffic Redirection** – By prepending AS8048 many times, an entity could push traffic away from the official path and toward a covert intermediary. This would enable data collection on sensitive traffic without raising immediate alarms. 2. **Mitigation of DoS or Jamming** – An attacker could inflate the AS path to make the BGP announcement less attractive, thereby protecting a target from being routed through a vulnerable AS during an outage. 3. **Disruption of State Communications** – If the route leak was orchestrated by the government or an adversary as a pre‑emptive move, they could have rerouted critical infrastructure traffic to pre‑arranged fallback routes. These scenarios remain speculative; however, public data shows deliberate manipulations that deserve close scrutiny. ## 5. Technical Forensics Steps 1. **Collect BGP Streams** – Use RIPE RIS or RouteViews to gather raw BGP messages for the affected prefixes. 2. **Parse AS Paths** – Employ tools like *bgpdump* or *BGPstream* to extract AS path information and identify repeat patterns. 3. **Cross‑Reference WHOIS and Reverse‑DNS** – Verify ownership of the leaked prefixes and discover the end systems affected. 4. **Temporal Analysis** – Align BGP anomalies with external events (e.g., power grid failures, military movements) to assess correlation. 5. **Simulate BGP Policies** – Use a network simulator (Quagga, BIRD) to model how the repeated AS prepending would affect global routing decisions. ## 6. Conclusion The January 2024 Venezuela blackout was accompanied by a clear, technical anomaly: a BGP route leak involving repeated AS8048 prepend on eight critical prefixes. The leak’s timing, combined with rapid political developments, suggests that BGP manipulation may have played a role in facilitating strategic communications or surveillance during that period. For defenders, this incident underscores the necessity of continuous BGP monitoring, RPKI enforcement, and collaboration with upstream providers. For researchers, it presents a rich dataset for studying how political crises can intersect with network-level attacks or defensive maneuvers. Future research should investigate whether similar patterns appear in other crisis contexts and whether proactive automation can mitigate such leaks before they impact critical infrastructure.