Exploiting Underlying Structure for Detailed Reconstruction of an Internet-scale Event

Network “telescopes” that record packets sent to unused blocks of Internet address space have emerged as an important tool for observing Internet-scale events such as the spread of worms and the backscatter from flooding attacks that use spoofed source addresses. Current telescope analyses produce detailed tabulations of packet rates, victim population, and evolution over time. While such cataloging is a crucial first step in studying the telescope observations, incorporating an understanding of the underlying processes generating the observations allows us to construct detailed inferences about the broader “universe” in which the Internetscale activity occurs, greatly enriching and deepening the analysis in the process. In this work we apply such an analysis to the propagation of the Witty worm, a malicious and well-engineered worm that when released in March 2004 infected more than 12,000 hosts worldwide in 75 minutes. We show that by carefully exploiting the structure of ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Abhishek Kumar, Vern Paxson, Nicholas Weaver
• Keywords: Current Telescope Analyses, IMC 2005, Telescope, Telescope Data