A public chat session was scheduled yesterday between, on one hand, the
Dutch Crown Prince Willem Alexander and his fiancee Maxima Zorreguieta and,
on the other hand 100 selected citizens. The session was made available for
everybody to watch on a Web site.
The server failed after a few minutes and did not come up again, so the rest
of the session was canceled.
According to several news sources (radio and TV news, printed press), KPN,
who provided the server, says that the crash was caused by "sabotage", and
that the site, that was designed for "tens of thousands" of users, received
3 billion (Yes, 3,000,000,000) hits.
The story does not look very plausible to me. To deliver 3,000,000,000 IP
packets, even short ones, in a few minutes takes something like a 10
Gbits/sec connection into the server, and would require quite a powerful
attacking machine with a comparable network connection, or a concerted
attack by tens of thousands of home PC's on modem lines.
I also had a look at
http://internettrafficreport.com
Such a volume of traffic in a short time should cause some slowdown of other
Internet traffic in the networks concerned. I saw no noticeable performance
degradation in any of the Dutch routers monitored by this site, nor anywhere
else, around the time of the event.
Speculation in the media now goes that the site simply received more genuine
hits than it was designed for, but not billions (Holland has 16 million
inhabitants), and could not cope, and that KPN is reluctant to admit their
mis-estimation of the traffic.
Does anybody have more information about what really happened? [Erling Kristiansen via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 89]
0:00
#
G!
