The Tiger Effect and Internet DDoS

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."

Comments

You learn something new every day

[spun]

Who knew that there was a professional nail-biter's competition, let alone that Tiger Woods won it?

Tiger effect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't most users updated to Leopard by now?

Re:Tiger effect?

[morgan_greywolf]

Haven't most users updated to Leopard by now?

Oh, FSCKING JEBUS. Why does some nitwit have to make everything about Apple?!

Hint to Steve Jobs genuflecting tards: No, life is not all about Apple. No go outside and get some fresh air. Now.

Nail-biting victory?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hard to believe that there's anything that can possibly be nail-biting about watching golf.

Re:Nail-biting victory?

[swb]

I used to feel the same exact way -- I thought watching golf was about as exciting as watching the grass its played on grow.

I don't know what happened, but I've gotten kind of hooked on the major tournaments. There's enough camera coverage that they actually spend most of the time with a decent golfer hitting the ball, so its not just a bunch of guys walking around, and they're almost exclusively in high definition.

Re:Nail-biting victory?

[drew]

No, you don't get it. By watching in HD you can actually watch the grass grow while watching the golf game, so you get double the enjoyment.

Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!?

[moore.dustin]

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!

Re:Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!?

[thecheatah]

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.

Re:Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you sat on your ass and said nothing eh?

Great.

Re:Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!?

[zappepcs]

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.

Re:Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!?

[ACMENEWSLLC]

These streams are 800Kb/s each. On top of that, they run over SSL which adds to the overhead. And each connection streams from one of hundreds of IP ranges.

We have 500 users sharing a dual T1, all wanting to watch this. So why did business transactions begin failing? I wonder.

Yea, we saw this.

Since it was SSL we can't inspect it at the application layer for QoS. Since it's a huge number of IP ranges, that gets us too. We can't transparently proxy SSL so Squid can't help. It's a flash stream over https.

So we QoSed the end users on port 443 in this case. 300b/s seems about right. :P

omfg!ponies

[Rob Kaper]

Run for the hills! Internet traffic doubles/triples during a major sports event? Who could have known!

That's about as worthy of an article as one "discovering" Euro Cup 2008 matches causes certain European streets to be abandoned for ninety minutes.

I can understand how such a traffic increase would be reason for alarm for the average network administrator, but you'd think service providers whose main business is the infrastructure would be aware of major streaming events. This shouldn't have surprised so many people.

Re:Not Firefox?

[truthsearch]

Joke --------> *whoosh*
          O <--- You
        --|--
          |
        / \
 

(Credit and credit)

Re:naming this effect?

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

What does Final Fantasy 3 have to do with this? You leave that ragtag crew out of it!

Re:Oops.

[Da Fokka]

The kiloclit