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."

IDG News Service

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