...

Just a handful of traceroutes would give it enough information to start at a major backbone and work back towards itself.

I guess all folks with Ph.D. at Akamai really are paid for nothing if a virus could calculate that with a few traceroutes.

Akamai is a business and has customers paying for its service, therefore they must attempt to get the best answer every time. But a virus can live with sub-optimal results as long as it does well enough to keep propagating and keep wreaking havoc. In fact, the virus writer might prefer that it does not shut down the entire Internet in one grand orgy of destruction because if that happens, there is too much incentive for police to identify the individuals concerned. The fact is that the idea has now been expressed in public. This almost guarantees that there are now multiple teams of virus writers working on incorporating these ideas into their creations. P.S. The only sure way of eradicating this Cisco bug from the Internet is to convert the Internet to IPv6. The bug doesn't affect Cisco's IPv6 code and older routers whose IOS cannot be upgraded also cannot do IPv6 so they cannot be used in an IPv6 Internet. Food for thought... --Michael Dillon