Effect of Malicious Traffic on the Network

Everyone knows that large-scale attacks have a negative impact on network performance. These guys did a writeup looking at the effects of various attacks.

The Internet has witnessed a steady rise in malicious traffic including DDoS and worm attacks. In this paper, we study the effect of malicious traffic on the background traffic by analyzing recent traces from two different locations. We show that malicious traffic causes an increase in the average DNS latency by 230% and an increase in the average web latency by 30% even on highly over-provisioned links. We also study the effect of the recent linux slapper worm. Using packet-level simulations based on an empirically derived model of the worm, we demonstrate that the effect of worm-infected hosts can be disastrous when they trigger a DDoS attack.

Source: Effect of Malicious Traffic on the Network, Kun-chan Lan, Alefiya Hussain, and Debojyoti Dutta.