North American Network Operators Group
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ICMP traffic increasing on most backbones Re: GLBX ICMP rate limiting

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Thu Aug 28 12:07:02 2003 
On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Steve Carter wrote:
> The rate-limiters have become more interesting recently, meaning they've
> actually started dropping packets (quite a lot in some cases) because of
> the widespread exploitation of unpatched windows machines.

Yep, the amount of ICMP traffic seems to be increasing on most backbones
due to worm activity.  It probably hasn't exceed HTTP yet, but it is
surpasssing many other protocols.  Some providers have seen ICMP increase
by over 1,000% over the last two weeks.

Unfortunately, the question sometimes becomes which packets do you care
about more?  Ping or HTTP?

Patch your Windows boxes. Get your neighbors to patch their Windows boxes.

Microsoft make a CD so people can fix their Windows machines before they
connect them to the network.