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What is BGP?

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing system that keeps the internet running. Think of it like a real-time GPS for your data—every time you load a website, stream a video, or send an email, BGP is working behind the scenes to find the fastest, most efficient path your data should take to reach its destination.

The internet isn’t one big network, it’s made up of thousands of smaller, independently managed networks called Autonomous Systems (AS). Your ISP is one, and so is Google, and Netflix. BGP is the protocol that allows all of these separate networks to communicate with each other, share available routes, and move traffic between them efficiently. Each AS is identified by a unique Autonomous System Number (ASN), which BGP uses to map and track paths across the internet.

BGP was built for efficiency, not security. Because it relies on networks trusting each other’s routing announcements, it’s vulnerable to BGP hijacking. This is when a bad actor falsely claims ownership of a route and redirects your traffic through their network. BGP infrastructure is also a prime target in large-scale DDoS attacks, where flooding a key BGP link can knock out internet access for an entire region.