Netgear Router Flaw Floods University of Wisconsin with 250,000 Packets Per Second
Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server (2003)
In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin–Madison's public NTP server was hit by a massive flood of SNTP requests—over 250,000 packets per second. The culprit wasn't a DDoS attack but a design flaw in hundreds of thousands of Netgear residential routers, which sent queries every second. The university worked with Netgear and the IETF to fix the bug and mitigate the ongoing flood.
One query per second is ridiculous, and is far from best practice for NTP client behavior.
- ctippett
> Are incidents such as this a likely side-effect of ubiquitous, low-cost, perhaps even disposable Internet hosts?
The whole write-up is excellent. I was already impressed by the author, but the prescience of this comment... wow.
- spindump8930
This is likely being discussed because it's relevant to this similar modern day story involving Tesla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686766
- rkagerer
It struck me how much more useful information the graphs and diagrams here provide over their flashier counterparts you commonly see today.
The old-fashioned aesthetic almost feels like a cue what I'm looking at won't be slop.