BGP Hijacking: How Hackers Circumvent Internet Routing Security to Tear the Digital Fabric of Trust

This report explains how deficiencies in Internet routing trust models (BGP, RPKI, IRRs, and PKI) were exploited in two crypto-focused BGP hijacking incidents—KLAYswap (~$1.9M loss) and Celer Bridge (~$235k loss)—where attackers combined more-specific BGP announcements, IRR manipulation, and certificate issuance abuse to serve malicious frontends that redirected user transactions; it analyzes attack phases, systemic weaknesses, mitigation steps (RPKI/ROA/ROV, BGPSec, IRR improvements, IPFS) and surveys DLT-based proposals to strengthen routing/security.