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

People, like Akamia, might have better data but I found the train wreck and "code red" worm had almost identical impacts on the packet loss, latency, reachability measurements average of the tens of thousands of networks measured by several performance measurement services on the world-wide Internet. I found the "code red" worm interesting because it did have a measureable impact on overall Internet performance on the scale of a significant fiber cut. Which makes it a bit of a rarity. Most "security incidents" don't show up on global network measurements. Even DDOS attacks, which are hell for the individual network, disappear into the general noise of the Internet's "normal" ebb-and-flow of traffic changes. You need to go back to the February 2000 DDOS attacks to find another security incident which had as large an impact on global Internet performance.