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What's Behind The Odd Data?

Posted by timothy on from the to-ask-your-advice dept.

citking writes "CNet is reporting that 'network administrators and security experts continue to search for the cause of an increasing amount of odd data that has been detected on the Internet.' While this has been going on now for a few days and some experts have already declared victory against the 'trojan', others aren't so sure that the real culprit has been identified yet. Other stories can be found here(1) and here(2)."

6 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Shouldn't this be the.... by ReTay · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The âoefrom the incase you thought the Internet is not closely watched dept?â
    Heh

  2. Re:For those too lazy to read the article : ) by DoktorTomoe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hm, that's a theory. May I ask humbly if there is any proof for it?

    --
    Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
  3. History repeats by Zapper · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article: '' "I don't think it is a serious threat because it's not self-replicating," Meltzer said. "And it hasn't caused serious disruptions to anyone." ''

    Sounds like famous last words to me...

    --
    So much to do, so little bandwidth.
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    Try Mozilla
  4. Hmmmm... by HughJampton · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's a glitch in the Matrix!

    --
    In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters imagine YOU!
  5. Re:Why... by gclef · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As someone else has mentioned, the backbone is a terrible place to do filtering. The backbone has better things to do with its CPU time (like, routing between multiple DS3s, etc). Filtering is best done at the edge, meaning at the point where the customer is actually connected. If you filter there, you should have a good idea of exactly which sources are allowed to exist on this network, and should be able to build very strict filters on a router that isn't seeing massive amounts of traffic.
    The problems with this are: 1) it relies on everyone behaving & having a clue. As we've seen with patches, that just doesn't happen. 2) There are all sorts of situations (like customers multi-homing) that make these filters not scale well, so some ISPs just leave them off entirely.
    This subject has come up on NANOG about every other month for the past few years. It's not been resolved yet.

  6. 1024 byte window? by treat · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Typically, when first connecting to another computer, a device on the Internet will use a lower window size--say, 1,024 bytes.

    What OS uses a window this small by default? Why would you ever set an initial window smaller than the mss?