Microsoft Worms and Global Routing Instability

James Cowie writes: "Fresh analysis here indicates that worm propagation periods correlate very strongly with global BGP routing instability, as measured by sustained exponential increases in the number of prefix announcements and withdrawals seen in BGP message traces."

Comments

You don't say!!!

[squaretorus]

REALLY!!! Has anyone checked sun spot activity against this??

Prelimary list of reasons

[lythari]

"complete list of reasons still needs to be documented, but we suspect i) congestion-induced failures of BGP sessions due to timeouts; ii) flow-diversity induced failures of BGP sesions due to router CPU overloads; iii) proactive disconnection of certain networks; and iv) failures of other equipment at the Internet edge such as DSL routers and other devices."

MSGP

[artoo]

In an effort to reduce confusion regarding the correlation between IIS/MS Windows viruses and worms and degredation in internet traffic, Microsoft has announced the realease of their own global routing protocol, MSGP.

"MSGP has taken a few days to develop this great technology using some of the brightest minds from around the world. Incorporating transfer of information using FEP (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3093.txt), we can ensure that when a virus hits, all internet traffic will come to a screaching halt" a Microsoft spokesperson said at yesterdays press conference.

Cisco has announced they will have firmware revisions tomorrow to incorporate this into all their products.

Story not misleading

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The story seems to imply that the works spread faster because of BGP instability ...

No.

The story says that the two are "correlated". That means they seem to occur at the same time and to the same degree.

This is a strong hint that one may cause the other or they both may be caused by a common third phenomenon. But it isn't difinitive. And the choice of which is stated first in the report of correlation is totally arbitrary.