http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/15/most_blighted_darknet/ By Dan Goodin in San Francisco The Register 15th June 2010 Researchers probing a previously unused swath of internet addresses say they've stumbled onto the net's most blighted neighborhoods, with at least four times as much pollution as any they've ever seen. The huge chuck of more than 16.7 million addresses had never before been allocated and yet the so-called darknet was the dumping ground sustained barrages of misdirected data as high as 150 Mbps, with a peak as high as 870 Mbps, said Manish Karir, director of research and development at the non-profit group Merit Network. That was about four times higher than most darknets and 20 times higher than a previously unallocated address block of addresses set up as a control group. The block is referred to as a 1/8 (pronounced one slash eight) or 1.0.0.0/8 because it comprises 1.0.0.0 through 1.255.255.255, a designation of 224 individual IP addresses. Almost as soon as it was allocated by IANA, or the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, in late January, the researchers noticed it was absorbing huge amounts of garbage traffic, making many of the addresses largely unusable. "It's basically like an unallocated plot of land and you don't know what's there because nobody has paid attention to it before," Karir told The Register. "The concept of pollution is the same whether you're looking at a plot of land or whether you're looking at address space. And in both cases, it limits or it impacts the person who actually buys or owns that plot of land." [...] _________________________________________________________________ Attend Black Hat USA 2010, hosted at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada July 24-29th, offering over 60 training sessions and 11 tracks of Briefings from security industry elite. To sign up visit http://www.blackhat.comReceived on Tue Jun 15 2010 - 22:24:36 PDT
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