The Tiger Effect and Internet DDoS

An anonymous reader writes "Many US and Canadian ISPs thought they were under a massive denial of service attack yesterday — traffic spiked by hundreds of gigabits across North America. Turns out that the traffic was due to live streaming of the U.S. Open and Tiger Woods nail-biting victory."

Office bandwith

[silas_moeckel]

I remember working at a streaming media startup and a Tiger nail bitter was our first live event. 8 Years ago that was 24gb a sec and the average bit rate was 368kbs if I remember correctly. There is a lot more bandwidth now than then. The fun part was running the logs and associating the AS and often the big company associated with it, there seemed to be a lot of people with comfy offices a lot of bandwidth and a love of golf back then.

omfg!ponies

[Rob Kaper]

Run for the hills! Internet traffic doubles/triples during a major sports event? Who could have known!

That's about as worthy of an article as one "discovering" Euro Cup 2008 matches causes certain European streets to be abandoned for ninety minutes.

I can understand how such a traffic increase would be reason for alarm for the average network administrator, but you'd think service providers whose main business is the infrastructure would be aware of major streaming events. This shouldn't have surprised so many people.

the world is out of balance

[circletimessquare]

until a DDoS effort successfully disrupts tiger wood's game

DDoG?

better streaming?

[jschen]

Maybe we need a better streaming video mechanism for popular live streams? I would imagine that if everyone's watching the same thing at the same time, it ideally shouldn't take up any more bandwidth than, say, one compressed standard definition cable channel. Signed, naive chemist.

Re:Nail-biting victory?

[swb]

I used to feel the same exact way -- I thought watching golf was about as exciting as watching the grass its played on grow.

I don't know what happened, but I've gotten kind of hooked on the major tournaments. There's enough camera coverage that they actually spend most of the time with a decent golfer hitting the ball, so its not just a bunch of guys walking around, and they're almost exclusively in high definition.

Troubling it wasn't recognized sooner

[tacokill]

How could this possibly be confused with a DDOS attack?

It makes me nervous that it even got to that point. How can a competent ISP confuse DDOS attacks with streaming video (most likely, the same streaming video sent to all people)? Isn't there a pattern there? Couldn't they see the connections were all coming from the same server or block of servers? Couldn't they see all of the connections were using the same protocol? Couldn't they see they were all using the same port?

How the hell do they confuse that with a DDOS? I am just a lowly part-time IT network manager at my company and even I can see the difference between streaming video and "other bad stuff".

Someone smarter than me please help me understand more about this. How did this get far enough to convince the ISP's they were being DDOS'd?

Re:Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you sat on your ass and said nothing eh?

Great.

No NBA...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I was trying to watch the NBA match online... no way!
What's the point on watching a guy with a stick if u can watch LA getting crushed?

What Cable Providers are afraid of

[aliens]

All these moves to charge per usage is going to blow up in their face.

They're worried this kind of usage will eat into their own TV viewership. What better way to prevent that from happening than by charging those who use it.

What will end up happening is customers will get in a tizzy and without suitable alternatives lawsuits will fly.

In the end either they'll have to abandon these plans or competition will be forced into the market.

Re:Well that doesn't explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oklahoma City is a boring place if you're a boring person. Oklahoma City is a terrible city if you're a fool who doesn't know how to find a good time. You can find any place to be boring/terrible if you're not willing to get off your ass and do something about it.

Re:Office bandwith

[cheater512]

I just hope a CEO asks the obvious question: "Why did it take out our big net connections? They were all watching the same thing!"

Maybe then they will enable multicast.

Re:Multicast.

[Kjella]

Yep, this is exactly the sort of situation that IP Multicast was created for. It has been part of the IP RFCs since forever. Maybe more incidents like this will convince more ISPs to configure their routers to support it, so we could start using it.

The more time passes, the less likely I think we'll ever use it. Multicast requires that all the people watch the same thing at the same time. Sure there are exceptions like this but what most people want the net for is surfing random stuff like YouTube, not being tied to some schedule. Plus being individual, hopefully I can pause the stream and pick it up a bit later, rewind a bit if I want to watch something again and so on. Multicast has all the convinience of TV without a DVR, unless you build the DVR into the browser. With the TV (read: CABLE) companies so much against Internet being a competitior for TV, I don't think we'd see multicast before bandwidth is so high it'd be a moot point. I'd rather take my 100Mbit line and be on my own schedule, thank you.

Re:Nail-biting victory?

[geekoid]

Sure, lots of skill, but nail biting? uummm no.

I don't think anyone doubts the level of skill involved.

Re:Nail-biting victory?

[maglor_83]

I can't say I like watching someone coding up search functionality in a program either.