NOW READ THIS
("Security Advisory")
Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0457 Internet Trash Problem:
Between 1 and 3 percent of all traffic on the internet are meaningless packets of information,
used in distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) to knock web sites offline. Those are
the findings of Arbor Networks, a network traffic analysis company that recently looked at
traffic flowing among more than 68 internet service providers to see how much of it was malicious.
The thing that's surprising, Arbor found it is consistently 1 to 3 percent. To purchase the
bandwidth that Arbor tracked in these DDOS attacks, a legitimate user would have to pay hundreds
of thousands of dollars per month. Studying the data from about 1,300 routers over 18 months,
Arbor found that the tidal waves of SYN (synchronization) or ICMP (Internet Control Message
Protocol) packets used in DDOS attacks rarely dropped below 1% of all traffic and could easily
rise to 6% during peak periods. Arbor's data shows other trends too. Attacks drop off during
Christmas and New Year's, perhaps while the attackers are "hungover or expending their spoils,"
McPherson wrote in a blog posting. The most common targets are Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers,
commonly used by hackers and technical types to meet online and chat with each other. With spam
making up almost all email traffic, there is a considerable amount of junk clogging the internet's
pipes. Arbor estimates that as much as 10% of the internet's traffic could be "raw
sewage."
(IDG News Service 01APR08)