Press Room: 2003
Keynote Reports Internet Nearing Full Recovery; Availability Levels Return to Normal Following Weekend MS-SQL Worm Attack
SAN MATEO, California — January 27, 2003 — Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), the global leader in Web performance management and testing services, reports that the Internet is almost fully recovered from this weekend’s Web attack. Keynote reported a massive worldwide slowdown in Internet traffic along with a marked increase in unavailable Web sites following the reported release of the MS-SQL Worm (called "Sapphire" or "SQL-Hell"), on January 25. The performance problems began before midnight in the Asia-Pacific region and then spread very quickly into the U.S. and Europe.
“This was a rather simple worm to fix, and as of now, Internet availability is back where it was,” said Eric Siegel, principal Internet consultant, Keynote Systems. “Although we detected some early morning problems on the East Coast, it looks like people now have a handle on the situation.”
In the space of a few hours, this Internet worm, which creates a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the entire Internet, spread across the world and had massive impacts on Web sites. Download times increased by an average of 50% for the largest U.S.-based sites, rendering many sites completely unavailable, and forced the complete shutdown of many Internet nodes because of the flood of worm traffic. The data flood was so massive that it resulted in the failure of major Internet backbone switches, thereby slowing its own advance around the world.
Similar performance degradation was seen in Asia-Pacific and in Europe. Asia-Pacific’s Web site availability plummeted more than 30%, but was resolved by 1 pm EST. Europe’s difficulties were also generally resolved by 1 pm EST.
This worm relied on a well-documented security flaw in Microsoft software and on the fact that huge numbers of system operators don't keep up-to-date with all of the security bulletins issued by Microsoft. Fortunately, this particular worm was easily defeated by the installation of protective gates to filter it out in the Internet switches. Future variations of this worm may not be so easy to defeat and may propagate even faster.
The typical Web user would certainly notice the impact of this worm. The average Web site in the Keynote Business-40 performance index of 40 major U.S.-based Web sites was slowed more than 50% between the hours of midnight and 1 pm EST on Saturday, and availability also dropped approximately 10% within the U.S. as the worm worked its way through the inter-connected Internet backbones. By 2 pm EST normal Web performance was reappearing in the U.S., and by 7 pm it had been completely restored.
The Keynote Business-40 Index (KB-40), which was used for this report, is a widely-used measure of the performance and availability of the home pages of 40 major U.S.-based Web sites as seen from the major Internet backbones in over 50 major metropolitan areas worldwide. For over five years, it has been accepted as the standard measure of how Web performance is perceived by the general public. It is measured over high-bandwidth, corporate connections; that ensures that any problems are due to Internet backbone performance and are not due to problems near the measurement agent. (Other Keynote indices give performance over dial-up, cable, and DSL access links.)
Each Web home page in the KB-40 is measured every 15 minutes at each Keynote measurement location; these measurements are averaged to produce the index. Availability is the measure of the number of page download attempts that succeeded in retrieving a complete page without errors and without timeouts.
About Keynote
Keynote Systems (Nasdaq "KEYN"), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the global leader in Internet performance management services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote’s services enable corporate enterprises to benchmark, diagnose, test and manage their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. Approximately 2,300 corporate IT departments and 18,000 individual subscribers rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective services to optimize revenues and reduce downtime costs without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations.
Keynote Systems, Inc. was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
© 2002 Keynote Systems, Inc. Keynote and The Internet Performance Authority are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Editorial Contacts:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote Systems, (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Erika Freed, Ruder Finn, (212) 715-1538, freede@ruderfinn.com
