On Mon, 30 July 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:

What do you think had more world-wide impact on the Internet?

1. The train accident in Baltimore 2. The "code red" worm

What I found interesting is they both had about the same impact on the typical network performance measurements of packet loss, latency, reachability of the world-wide internet as measured by several public internet performance measurement companies. Perhaps someone like Akami has better data. Its somewhat of a rarity for a "security incident" to show up on the global network performance measurements close to the severity of a fiber cut like the Baltimore train wreck. Most security incidents, even typical DDOS attacks, have a significant affect on a few individual networks. But they tend to disappear into the noise when you look at global measurements. I needed to go back to the February 2000 DDOS attacks to find another security incident which had as severe an impact on global Internet performance.