Bad Internet behavior

Among other things, I am responsible for maintaining my company's computer systems, and this includes monitoring my system logs. Over the past week or so, I have noticed an uptick in the level of bad behavior from various Internet parties. For example, this weekend, someone was attempting a DNS amplification attack against isprime.com (NANOG thread). This type of attack uses small forged requests to a large number of servers, where the responses are much larger and are sent to the victim IP address. The result is that the victim's network is completely flooded with traffic. I had to make some minor changes to my DNS server to silently drop these requests.

The bad behavior has not been restricted to just the blackhat community. There has been an increase in the number of commercial companies that try to stealthily monitor web sites, thinking that they won't be noticed. These companies have automated bots that download entire sites over time. These bots don't obey the standard bot rules (such as honoring robots.txt), and they pretend to be various versions of Internet Explorer. Despite their efforts, they are still easy to detect and watch. The old assumption about anything you post on the Internet can be read by anyone is more true than ever. Even if you delete the material, it is likely that some "cyber intelligence" firm has it archived away.