Did the Spamhaus DDoS Really Slow Down Global Internet Access?

CowboyRobot writes "Despite the headlines, the big denial of service attack may not have slowed the Internet after all. The argument against the original claim include the fact that reports of Internet users seeing slowdowns came not from service providers, but the DDoS mitigation service CloudFlare, which signed up Spamhaus as a customer last week. Also, multiple service providers and Internet watchers have now publicly stated that while the DDoS attacks against Spamhaus could theoretically have led to slowdowns, they've seen no evidence that this occurred for general Internet users. And while some users may have noticed a slowdown, the undersea cable cuts discovered by Egyptian sailors had more of an impact than the DDoS."

Comments

Re:reporting

[sl4shd0rk]

resolution (eg ingress/egress filtering, rate limiting, non-recursive responses from outside your domain) to legal ones

Umm.. I'm not sure I follow you. The DDoS was comprised of DNS Reflection. Trying to add filtering at layer 2/3 is absolutely pointless since you're saturated at layer 0. The physical hardware is overwhelmed trying to keep up with the packets coming in.