It’s an issue of the Internet infrastructure well known since at least the 1990s - data / packets can be rerouted to more or less any IP address via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP, RFC 4271).
BGP is normally used to announce between routers which networks are reachable by which (preferred) routes. And on the Internet all routers trust each other and there are no mechanisms built into the protocol to assure that the counterpart in a communication “does not lie“.
The issue, as said, is not new and known at least to insiders (security expert Peiter C. Zatko aka Mudge claimed 1998 during a Senate hearing that he could bring down the whole Internet in 30 minutes via BGP) but with I-Net 9/11 plans and recent geo-political DDoS attacks the discussion seems to have been revived during the last days.
Below a link to an event analysis animation / video by RIPE of the YouTube blackout earlier this year when Pakistani Telecom used BGP to announce a new route to the YouTube servers (a Null device in Pakistan).
Click on the image below for the link
More information:
YouTube Hijacking: A RIPE NCC RIS case study
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