On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Steve Carter wrote:
The rate-limiters have become more interesting recently, meaning they've actually started dropping packets (quite a lot in some cases) because of the widespread exploitation of unpatched windows machines.
Yep, the amount of ICMP traffic seems to be increasing on most backbones due to worm activity. It probably hasn't exceed HTTP yet, but it is surpasssing many other protocols. Some providers have seen ICMP increase by over 1,000% over the last two weeks. Unfortunately, the question sometimes becomes which packets do you care about more? Ping or HTTP? Patch your Windows boxes. Get your neighbors to patch their Windows boxes. Microsoft make a CD so people can fix their Windows machines before they connect them to the network.