North American Network Operators Group

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

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Mon Jul 30 11:51:15 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

What I found interesting is they both had about the same impact
on the typical network performance measurements of packet loss,
latency, reachability of the world-wide internet as measured by
several public internet performance measurement companies.  Perhaps
someone like Akami has better data.

Its somewhat of a rarity for a "security incident" to show up
on the global network performance measurements close to the
severity of a fiber cut like the Baltimore train wreck.

Most security incidents, even typical DDOS attacks, have a
significant affect on a few individual networks.  But they tend
to disappear into the noise when you look at global measurements.
I needed to go back to the February 2000 DDOS attacks to find
another security incident which had as severe an impact on
global Internet performance.