Looking for an Akamai contact, strange DoS traffic sourcing from Akamai sources

Fri Jan 21 14:43:48 UTC 2011

On 1/21/2011 8:38 AM, Tom Beecher wrote:
> Jack-
>
> This is exactly what we're seeing. The Akamai server starts a
> retransmission flood aimed at a specific address randomly. We're seeing
> thousands of retransmissions of the same packet over and over again,
> same sequence/ack numbers, all 1460 bytes. In the last capture I have,
> it was all JPEG data, although we weren't capturing entire packets.
> There is a slight difference in the capture payloads, two bytes each time.
>

The content between attacks changes at times, as do the source IPs, as 
they send different content. We've noticed at least 2 different akamai 
hosted sites packets being sent.

1460 is definitely the number. What gets me is that the 3-way should be 
complete to allow the 1460, and the modem bank is spamming host 
unreachable ICMP messages since that IP is offline.

> I had another dial-up provider contact me off list, and he's seeing the
> same thing. I'm wondering if this is actually more widespread, but only
> dial-up providers are really seeing the effects since a 3-5Mbps burst is
> most noticeable for us on our smaller upstream links. //

This was my thought, though in my downstream's case, it's saturating his 
DS-3. The 45mb spikes were just enough for me to barely make it out on 
the akamai gig-e graphs.

He's also not always receiving from my local node. Sometimes his other 
transit links saturate due to remote nodes doing the same thing.

Jack