Early Detection of BGP Instabilities Resulting from Internet Worm Attacks

This is an interesting proposal, but I'm not sure that routing disruptions are the right place to detect the spread of a worm. After all, the preceeding days' worth of posts showed how large the routing disruptions can be, but there's always some BGP disruption that is going on. What's more, only a small number of worms have truly impacted BGP routing tables.

The increasing incidences of worm attacks in the Internet and the resulting instabilities in the global routing properties of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routers pose a serious threat to the connectivity and the ability of the Internet to deliver data correctly. In this paper we propose a mechanism to detect/predict the onset of such instabilities which can then enable the timely execution of preventive strategies in order to minimize the damage caused by the worm. Our technique is based on online statistical methods relying on sequential change-point and persistence filter based detection algorithms. Our technique is validated using a year's worth of real traces collected from BGP routers in the Internet that we use to detect/predict the global routing instabilities corresponding to the Code Red II, Nimda and SQL Slammer worms.

Source: Early Detection of BGP Instabilities Resulting from Internet Worm Attacks, S. Deshpande,  M. Thottan, B. Sikdar.