Inferring Internet Denial-of-Service Activity

David Moore
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)
San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of California, San Diego

Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego

In this paper, we seek to answer a simple question: "How prevalent are denial-of-service attacks in the Internet today?". Our motivation is to understand quantitatively the nature of the current threat as well as to enable longer-term analyses of trends and recurring patterns of attacks. We present a new technique, called "backscatter analysis", that provides an estimate of worldwide denial-of-service activity. We use this approach on three week-long datasets to assess the number, duration and focus of attacks, and to characterize their behavior. During this period, we observe more than 12,000 attacks against more than 5,000 distinct targets, ranging from well known e-commerce companies such as Amazon and Hotmail to small foreign ISPs and dial-up connections. We believe that our work is the only publically available data quantifying denial-of-service activity in the Internet.