Only 2% Of Internet Traffic is 'Raw Sewage'

This figure, recently touted by Arbor Networks, strikes me as very low.According to a recent posting by Arbor Networks, which is monitoring ISP traffic in a data sharing program, the company is seeing about 1,300 distributed denial-of-service attacks a day. About 1 million since they started monitoring about 18 months ago.

The data sharing program has some reach, with 68 separate ISPs participating, and with more than 140,000 interfaces. They say traffic peaks at about 1.5 Tbps on the 1,300 routers it tracks. (Yes, there seems to be a 1 to 1 correlation between the number of attacks and the number of routers in the program . . . ).

But for their nearly two years of effort, they're not showing much. Like, for instance, attack frequency drops significantly on Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Years Day. . . . Fascinating . . .

They also found IRC servers are the most common targets "although those attacks are usually lower-scale and not as well distributed as larger attacks," the post states. What do you think? These are kids attacking the IRC command and control centers of their friends' botnets? That's my suspicion.

Also, DDoS attacks account for ~1-3% for the inter-domain traffic. There have been occasional peaks above 5%. While not inconsequential, this amount certainly isn't going to threaten the service levels of any major IPS.