Border gateway protocol (BGP), a routing protocol used to transfer data and information between different host gateways, is fundamental to the internet's design. Unfortunately, it's flawed in two respects: It lacks route authentication and basic origin validation. That makes BGP liable to cause connectivity issues in the event of misconfigurations, and worrisomely opens the door to malicious spammers, traffic interceptors, and cryptocurrency thieves. That's why researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab recently conducted a study of BGP activity over the course of five years, with the goal of identifying the dominant characteristics of hijackers and how they differ from legitimate systems. The work informed a set of metrics to which the team applied an AI algorithm to evaluate their accuracy in identifying hijackers' patterns.