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."

Tiger? Euro2008?

[superphreak]

I thought it was due to Euro2008 coverage on Espn360.com

Re:naming this effect?

[Gewalt]

How bout we call it 'FF3 world record attempt' instead?

Well that doesn't explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

why I'm paying 80 dollars a month for only 6mbps download and 512kb upload. And that every night around 8 or so my internet starts to go dial up speed. And that the router I have is 100% unconfigurable. I literally can't do a damn thing to it. And if that's not enough, there's one technician in the whole area. That's 4 counties. Illinois sucks. There're only two ISP's for me. One offers 512kb download and 256kb upload for 25 dollars a month. Or I can keep what I have now. Sorry for the mostly off topic rant, but I'm in a bad mood today all because of my internet. Rawrr!!!! And yet, I'm still on it.

Jennifered?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Jennicam caused massive overloading the first time she had realtime sex. Likely there were other occasions before that too.

Wow! Could Thse ISPs be in Trouble!?

[moore.dustin]

If these ISPs were overloaded to the point of thinking they may be being DDoS'ed over one event online, they are they wholly unprepared for any sort of attack that may actually be focused at them? Imagine the carnage a real attack would wreak on the ISPs! Is there anyone out there that knows the likelihood of ISPs going down if they came under a real attack? If a few botnets targeted these ISPs, could they be brought down completely? Imagine one of these ISPs really stepping up the game for a tiered internet service model, putting themselves out there as a lightening rod for angry nerds. Could a coordinated effort break the back of an ISPs ability to provide any service whatsoever?

Your thoughts are most welcome and I thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts!

Match

[Tiro]

I couldn't access the NBC stream at all.

Fortunately Hong Kong's Star Sports was accessible through Sopcast P2P.

Great match! I watched the back nine and the sudden death playoff hole. Unfortunately the commentators were horrible. They did not announce the length of the puts (huge annoyance) and they spoke when there was nothing to say!

We want Jim Nantz, or perhaps the British announcers at The Open.

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

[thecheatah]

Umm, I knew a person who managed a very large botnet. He use to be able to take down the internet for a general area. He use to have "wars" with other botnet people and you would notice the internet gone for a few hours, in my neighborhood at least. Then he was hired to take down a website in the west side of the Pennsylvania. He actually took down the internet for the whole area. Banks there couldn't communicate and all that. Well, he was caught and spent some time in prison. Now he doesn't really fit in with society any more and spends time in and out of prison.

Re:Match

[corbettw]

I couldn't access the NBC stream at all.

Fortunately Hong Kong's Star Sports was accessible through Sopcast P2P.

That's awesome. Someone in the US (I assume you're in the US, since you referred to NBC and not some other network) had to watch a US sporting event by bouncing off a server in China.

The best part? It's not really all that impressive nowadays. But the entire concept was unthinkable to most people even 10 years ago.

Re:Israel we bless thee HEIL HITLER

[techno-vampire]

In case you haven't noticed (and you may not) moderators are now getting three times as many mod points. That means that the trolls have to work three times as hard and post three times as many stupid, off-topic, offensive or otherwise inappropriate posts so that foolish moderators will waste all those mod points modding them down instead of using them to reward people for good posts. When I have mod points, I tend to ignore stupid posts if they're by AC, because it doesn't do any good. In this case, however, I'd gladly burn a mod point on the OP because the poster didn't post anonymously and would take a karma-hit for it. Of course, it's possible that it's just a throw-away account to be used until it's been down-modded to oblivion then abandoned as the troll starts a new one. So it goes.

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

[zappepcs]

I didn't see anyone else catch this. WTF do you mean to tell me that they 'thought' it was a DDoS? Thought? So much for that traffic shaping magic. Sure, if it had been P2P we'd know exactly what little johnny down the street has on his iPod this morning and the RIAA would be all over the news with it and how file sharers killed the Internet.

From the looks of this, co-ordinated effort is nothing more than a couple thousand bot computers infected with a 'lets watch sports over the net' worm. Think of it. One bot net with 100,000 computers all trying to watch ESPN at the same time, and those that can, also trying to watch something from Europe at the same time.

One word: multicast

Uni-casting VOD over the Internet will keep doing this over and over again and ISPs will continue to blame file sharing for their lack of both foresight and bandwidth.

IpTV, not ready yet.

[EnOne]

sarcasm - Nice to know that now we can get our shows easily and smoothly across the internet. We probably no longer need to broadcast over the air - /sarcasm

Re:Nothing to look at here

[Anonymous Coward]

As Mike and Mike said best in the morning, Tiger Woods is the next Michael Jordan.

In terms of media personality/clelebrity, yes. In terms of play, no. Tiger is not the Michael Jordan of golf. He surpassed that and is the Wilt Chamberlain of golf.

Multicast.

[pavon]

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

Re:Nail-biting victory?

[PitaBred]

If you played, you'd understand the skill going into it.

It's like the manager who can't possibly understand how hard it can be to add search functionality to the program... I mean, all you have to do is add that button that says "Search", right?

Re:Net neutrality

[genericpoweruser]

If this had a higher priority it might have choked everything out. If it had a lower priority it wouldn't have worked at all. As it is (neutral) a thing has priority directly proportional to its popularity (providing it doesn't "cheat," so to speak, like torrents do [by making many, many connections]).

My opinion anyway; Feel free to rebut it.

Re:Multicast.

[pavon]

I think another good use for it would be saving server bandwidth on downloads without congesting the last mile the way P2P does. Say you offer several (number varying by demand) staggered multicast streams of a file each at some lowest-common-denominator (DSL) speed. Then you have a client that will connect to however many streams your connection can handle, and then just use P2P to pick up the few stray packets that you miss (since you don't normally resend with multicast).

The overall bandwidth would be much lower than with either individual downloads or P2P, and the bandwidth needed by the server isn't much more than you would need to seed bit torrent. I could see this working particularly well with a subscription style service that automatically downloads new episodes of shows you like when they become available, so the are ready to watch anytime without needed the bandwidth that On-demand requires.