Those of you awash in the flood of unfiltered, uncorroborated news describing how a Chinese ISP hijacked 15% of the Internet may want to read Craig Labovitz's stellar article on the incident. For those of you with children in the room, let me warn you in advance: Craig's article is awash with facts, statistical evidence, and constructive insight.
Here are some teaser facts and insights from Craig's article. First, the facts:
"On April 8th a Chinese Internet provider announced 40,000 routes belonging to other ISPs / enterprises around the world."
"ATLAS data from 80 carriers around the world graphed below shows little statistically significant increase [in traffic forwarded to the Chinese ISP] due to the hijack on April 8, 2010."
Based on observed traffic, the diverted traffic "never topped a handful of Gbps. And in an Internet quickly approaching 80-100Tbps, 1-3 Gbps of traffic is far from 15% (it is much closer to 0.015%)."
[Note: ATLAS is reputed to be the world's largest distributed darknet sensor network. In common language, it's a gigantic monitoring system that collects and analyzes Internet traffic from collection points all over the globe.]
Now the insights:
"in an industry crowded with security marketing and hype, it is important we limit the hyperbole and keep the discussion focused around the legitimate long-term infrastructure security threats and focused on technical realities."
"We need to fix Internet infrastructure security, but we also need to be precise in our analysis of the problems."
Please take time to click through and read the full article. Well done, Craig!
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