North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Hard data on network impact of the "Code Red" worm?

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Mon Jul 30 11:36:06 2001

On Mon, 30 July 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:
> What do you think had more world-wide impact on the Internet?
> 
>    1. The train accident in Baltimore
>    2. The "code red" worm

People, like Akamia, might have better data but I found the train
wreck and "code red" worm had almost identical impacts on the
packet loss, latency, reachability measurements average of the
tens of thousands of networks measured by several performance
measurement services on the world-wide Internet.

I found the "code red" worm interesting because it did have a
measureable impact on overall Internet performance on the scale
of a significant fiber cut.  Which makes it a bit of a rarity.
Most "security incidents" don't show up on global network
measurements.  Even DDOS attacks, which are hell for the
individual network, disappear into the general noise of the
Internet's "normal" ebb-and-flow of traffic changes.  You need
to go back to the February 2000 DDOS attacks to find another
security incident which had as large an impact on global Internet
performance.