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The Tiger Effect and Internet DDoS

Posted by timothy on from the aka-the-kenn-starr-steamroller dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Many US and Canadian ISPs thought they were under a massive denial of service attack yesterday — traffic spiked by hundreds of gigabits across North America. Turns out that the traffic was due to live streaming of the U.S. Open and Tiger Woods nail-biting victory."

8 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Tiger? Euro2008? by superphreak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I thought it was due to Euro2008 coverage on Espn360.com

    --
    Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
  2. Jennifered? by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Jennicam caused massive overloading the first time she had realtime sex. Likely there were other occasions before that too.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  3. Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!? by moore.dustin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If these ISPs were overloaded to the point of thinking they may be being DDoS'ed over one event online, they are they wholly unprepared for any sort of attack that may actually be focused at them? Imagine the carnage a real attack would wreak on the ISPs! Is there anyone out there that knows the likelihood of ISPs going down if they came under a real attack? If a few botnets targeted these ISPs, could they be brought down completely? Imagine one of these ISPs really stepping up the game for a tiered internet service model, putting themselves out there as a lightening rod for angry nerds. Could a coordinated effort break the back of an ISPs ability to provide any service whatsoever?

    Your thoughts are most welcome and I thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts!

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    Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
    1. Re:Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!? by thecheatah · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Umm, I knew a person who managed a very large botnet. He use to be able to take down the internet for a general area. He use to have "wars" with other botnet people and you would notice the internet gone for a few hours, in my neighborhood at least. Then he was hired to take down a website in the west side of the Pennsylvania. He actually took down the internet for the whole area. Banks there couldn't communicate and all that. Well, he was caught and spent some time in prison. Now he doesn't really fit in with society any more and spends time in and out of prison.

    2. Re:Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!? by zappepcs · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I didn't see anyone else catch this. WTF do you mean to tell me that they 'thought' it was a DDoS? Thought? So much for that traffic shaping magic. Sure, if it had been P2P we'd know exactly what little johnny down the street has on his iPod this morning and the RIAA would be all over the news with it and how file sharers killed the Internet.

      From the looks of this, co-ordinated effort is nothing more than a couple thousand bot computers infected with a 'lets watch sports over the net' worm. Think of it. One bot net with 100,000 computers all trying to watch ESPN at the same time, and those that can, also trying to watch something from Europe at the same time.

      One word: multicast

      Uni-casting VOD over the Internet will keep doing this over and over again and ISPs will continue to blame file sharing for their lack of both foresight and bandwidth.

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  4. Re:Match by corbettw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I couldn't access the NBC stream at all.

    Fortunately Hong Kong's Star Sports was accessible through Sopcast P2P. That's awesome. Someone in the US (I assume you're in the US, since you referred to NBC and not some other network) had to watch a US sporting event by bouncing off a server in China.

    The best part? It's not really all that impressive nowadays. But the entire concept was unthinkable to most people even 10 years ago.
    --
    God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  5. Multicast. by pavon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yep, this is exactly the sort of situation that IP Multicast was created for. It has been part of the IP RFCs since forever. Maybe more incidents like this will convince more ISPs to configure their routers to support it, so we could start using it.

  6. Re:Nail-biting victory? by PitaBred · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you played, you'd understand the skill going into it.

    It's like the manager who can't possibly understand how hard it can be to add search functionality to the program... I mean, all you have to do is add that button that says "Search", right?

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