Akamai an Inside Job?

Wed Jun 16 16:41:45 UTC 2004

At 08:23 AM 6/16/2004, David Kennedy CISSP wrote:

>http://www.overclockersclub.com/?read=8733819
>
>The Akamai attacks started in the morning and it was detected by
>Keynote Systems, a web tracking company that is able to track the load
>and bandwidth on the Internet. According to Keynote they saw
>an "Internet performance issue" this morning

Keynote's primary business model is measuring the performance and 
availability of public web sites as seen from a distributed network of 
synthetic probes.  They don't offer any services that "track the load and 
bandwidth on the Internet".  Here's what their public/PR type email alert 
said on the matter yesterday:

Keynote Internet Performance Alert

Starting at approximately 5:30am PDT today, a major Internet performance 
issue was detected by Keynote systems. By 6:00am, the availability of the 
Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index had dropped from its usual 
near-100% availability to 81% availability:
<http://keynote.lyris.net/t/4086/732513/23/0/>http://web507.keynote.com/mykeynote/Post/KB40data_061504_085844.asp

Further analysis by Keynote indicated that the availability issues were 
limited to several large sites, all of whom outsource their DNS services to 
Akamai. These sites dropped to near-zero availability:
<http://keynote.lyris.net/t/4086/732513/24/0/>http://web507.keynote.com/mykeynote/Post/KB40data_061504_090509.asp

Availability was largely restored by approximately 7:45am PDT.

>...
>They have tracked the attacker back to person that is at the Akamai
>Technologies ISP. No other information has been given to us at this
>time. We do not know if the FBI is working on this issue right now, but
>we expect them to do so.
>
>[DMK: Source, beyond overclockers, unknown, reliability and accuracy unknown.]

That's nonsense David.  Keynote measurements can distinguish between 
availability problems caused by DNS outages versus those caused by 
connectivity or site outages.  They manifestly don't track attackers.

Brian Mulvaney