What percentage of the Internet Traffic is junk?

Wed May 5 20:17:45 UTC 2004

At 12:55 PM 5/5/2004, Steve Gibbard wrote:

>If a few of you can stop being so pedantic for a second, the definition
>looks pretty easy to me: traffic unlikely to be wanted by the recipient.
>Presumably, if it's being sent that means somebody wanted to send it, so
>the senders' desires are a pretty meaningless metric.

Thanks Steve - good point. I have to believe that some of those that have 
solutions to some of these problems have made *some* measures so they can 
quantify the value of their solution.

>The harder pieces are going to be defining what traffic is unwanted in a
>way that scales to large-scale measurement.  Worm traffic is presumably
>measurable with Netflow, as are various protocol-types used mainly in DOS
>attacks.  Spam is harder to pinpoint by watching raw traffic, but perhaps
>comparing the total volume of TCP/25 traffic to the SpamAssassain hit
>rates at some representative sample of mail servers could provide some
>reasonable numbers there.

Yea, we can't get absolute #'s, but I think it would be helpful to have a 
defensible approximation.

>So, any of you security types have a list of the protocols that are more
>likely to be attack traffic than legitimate?

Or maybe those in the Research Community that have been doing traffic 
capture and analysis?

>-Steve
>
>On Wed, 5 May 2004, Mike Damm wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Very very very near to, but not quite 100%. Since almost all of the traffic
> > on the Internet isn't sourced by or destined for me, I consider it junk.
> >
> > Also remember that to a packet kid, that insane flood of packets destined
> > for his target is the most important traffic in the world. And to a 
> spammer,
> > the very mailings that are making him millions are more important than
> > pictures of someone's grandkids.
> >
> > I guess my point is junk is a very relative term. A study would need to
> > first be done to identify what junk actually is, then measuring it is
> > trivial.
> >
> >   -Mike
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: William B. Norton [mailto:wbn at equinix.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 11:21 AM
> > To: nanog at merit.edu
> > Subject: What percentage of the Internet Traffic is junk?
> >
> >
> > With all the spam, infected e-mails, DOS attacks, ultimately blackholed
> > traffic, etc. I wonder if there has been a study that quantifies
> >
> > What percentage of the Internet traffic is junk?
> >
> > Bill
> >