Internet Has a Trash Problem

[HelenaP]

Internet Has a Trash Problem, Researcher Says

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Somewhere between 1 percent and 3 percent of all traffic on the Internet is 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 between more than 68 Internet service providers to see how much of it was malicious.

"The thing that's surprising is it's consistently 1 to 3 percent," said Danny McPherson, Arbor's chief research officer. "It's pretty significant."

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, McPherson said.

That's not a problem for criminals, however, who use the network connections of their victims to attack others.

DDOS attacks try to overwhelm the victim's servers with routine Internet messages. Attackers try to send so many packets that the victim's computers are unable to do their regular job-- serving Web pages or sending e-mail, for example. They have become a common occurrence in recent years and have spawned a cottage industry of companies that try to mitigate their effects.

Studying the data from about 1,300 routers over 18 months, Arbor found that the tidal waves of SYN or ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) packets used in DDOS attacks rarely dropped below 1 percent of all traffic and could easily rise to 6 percent during peak periods.

Arbor's data show 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 up online and chat with each other.

With spam now making up almost all e-mail traffic, there's a considerable amount of junk clogging the Internet's pipes.

McPherson guessed that as much as 10 percent of the Internet's traffic could be "raw sewage."

-Source-

[El Comandante]

Gee, and I was worried about Global Warming... I wonder if this study could be a pretext by the traffic shapers (Comcast, ATT) to suggest some nefarious solutions?

[Boomer The Dog]

There we go again with those 'internet pipes'. It fits with the idea of net waste though..

I have a home router that has a page that tells what its firewall has blocked, and I see stuff like ICMP and Syn being blocked. I always thought it was odd when one IP will send a whole line of those packets and then be gone. I wonder why anyone would want to DOS my router?

They are the ICMP, Insane Clown Mental Posse.

[cheapprick]

There we go again with those 'internet pipes'. It fits with the idea of net waste though..

Tubes. The internet is a series of tubes that are easily clogged.

[mountain_rage]

Sadly the tube(pipe) analogy has some merit as both fluid dynamics and electrical conductivity share some parallels. That doesn't however mean that we should look at useless traffic as junk. It does however give a good imagery for the non-technical average Joe.

[Boomer The Dog]

Tubes, that reminds me of a show called Wild Wild West that I saw, where they talked through these tubes, that were like garden hoses with a funnel at each end. It was an intercom, but it was tubes being used for communications.

I guess saying tubes and pipes is okay, it just always sounded funny. We do talk about the 'flow' of current, electrons, and data, and with ordinary wire and high frequencies, most of the current travels on the outside of the wire. Then there's fiber, where the light carrying the data stays on the inside like a 'light pipe' I guess. The coax for cable TV and net is like a pipe too, and in fact it is an aluminum tube hard line in some parts of the system.

The idea of tubes for carrying internet that professional writers use, that gives me the image of a router with all kinds of actual tubes connected to it, like a pipe organ, just the thing to confuse folks who don't know how the net really works, woof.

[w31n3r]

sooo...does all this mean that the internet is going down the drain?

after hearing about miss bimbo, i'm all for DDOS attacks! where do i sign up for hacking 101?