Educational CyberPlayGround ®

Networks: LEARN HOW THE INTERNET WORKS

2016 How does the internet cross the ocean?

An introduction to network packet analysis

10/21/15 Attacks on Network Time Protocol can defeat HTTPS and create chaos
Exploits can be used to snoop on encrypted traffic and cause debilitating outages. Serious weaknesses in the Internet's time-synchronization mechanism can be exploited to cause debilitating outages, snoop on encrypted communications, or tamper with Bitcoin transactions, computer scientists warned Wednesday. The vulnerabilities reside in the Network Time Protocol, the widely used specification computers use to ensure their internal clocks are accurate. Surprisingly, connections between computers and NTP servers are rarely encrypted, making it possible for hackers to perform man-in-the-middle attacks that reset clocks to times that are months or even years in the past. Attacking the Network Time Protocol, researchers described several techniques to bypass measures designed to prevent such drastic time shifts. The paper also described ways to prevent large numbers of computers from successfully connecting to synchronization servers.

2015 Picture of Microwave networks between DC, NJ and Chicago (from The Fed Robbery Revisited 2013 detailed paper on FOMC leak)
Rigged Markets:
What exactly were those Federal Reserve lockup rules? Were organisations allowed to transmit information out of the room before 2 p.m. or not? The Federal Reserve won't say. A Fed spokesman declined to answer that question from CNBC. So we do not know if this was actually allowed or not. So it is difficult to understand what happened because the rules do not seem to be very clear and are not publicly available.

10/2/14 Global Infrastructure explained by Retired NSA Technical Director William Binney. Binney also mentions how the current NSA mass surveillance regime differs from aspects of an earlier less expensive program, called THINTHREAD, which both he and the former NSA senior computer scientist, Edward Loomis, invented. The presentation contains Binney's own slides and published documents released to journalists by Snowden.
The major collection of data occurs and it's done under Executive Order 12333-- not under FISA 702 or the Patriot Act or any of that. It's all done under one -- Executive Order 12333.
The phone network-- the phone switch telephone network. That includes satellite phones, and mobile phones, and everything, worldwide-- it's all numbered. There's a number scheme for it.
The entire world is broken up into nine zones and these are the numbering schemes for those zones. If you dial a number from the U.S.-- '01' or '011'-- then the zone of the world you want to call. If it's 3 or 4, you're going to Europe-- 7, Russia, and so on.
So I mean, the entire number scheme tells you exactly who you you have on the line-- these are machines passing it, so they have to have this data both ways, so they can route to and back. The machines do this. So if the machines do this, you know?
I mean, how could [Keith] Alexander [former director fo the NSA] come up and say, "I don't know if it was in the United States." When in fact, the machines have to know, okay? You have to, or it doesn't get through. It is the same with the Internet. Both IPc4 and IPc6 addresses are assigned by ISPs that obtain allopcations from a local Internet Registry or national internet registry ARIN, RIPE NCC, LACNIC, AfriNIC, APNIC.
They have to make the job look complicated. It's not complicated at all. They're real simple. And the in the Internet world, it's-- you know, IP address out of the IANA [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority] or the ICAAN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], you know. So, I mean-- the Internet world is divided into five zones, right? And you just block assign different number blocks to these different zones. Then it's subdivided down from the regional authorities-- down into the country authorities-- down into the service providers in local areas. So even if they want to assign an arbitrary number, that arbitrary number still tells you what zone of the world it is. And even if you look at the assignment and sub-assignments, you can get even further down in that.
<more> about TRW, Booz Allen and all the big guys made sure to get in on the 4 billion.

Neustar runs the number portability database. The battle over the little-known routing network reflects the central role that the phone companies play in the government's surveillance and phone-tracing capabilities. The phone-routing system grew out of a 1997 law that allowed cellphone and landline users to keep the same number even when they switched carriers. These so-called portability standards made things easier for consumers but created potential complications for intelligence and law enforcement officials in tracing phone calls and determining which numbers were tied to which carriers. The routing network that was put in place, with Neustar as its administrator, was designed partly to allow the government nearly instant access to the data on where calls were being routed. Law enforcement agencies regularly query the database when setting up wiretaps. Under the Ma Bell monopoly, keeping track of phone numbers fell to a unit of the old AT&T. As part of the 1984 breakup of Ma Bell, the unit was spun out as a separate company that eventually became Telcordia and was bought by Ericsson in 2012. After the industry fragmented and Congress in 1996 allowed people to keep their local phone numbers when switching carriers, a separate, central database became necessary. Neustar won a portion of the contract when the database was created in 1997. Customers who switch carriers now just have to wait a couple of minutes while Neustar's database is pinged and the number is reassigned. There are more than 800 million numbers in use in the U.S. Numbers not in the database would be landlines that have never switched owners or have never been acquired by other providers through mergers and acquisitions.

 

Networks: The 10 Most Bizarre and Annoying Causes of Fiber Cuts

When asked to name one of the great things about our network, I have to say it's our fiber footprint. With over 57,000 miles of intercity and 27,000 miles of metro fiber, our footprint is a grand design of both buried and aerial paths. It makes us unique, but with that also comes one of the worst things about our network, and that is the different types of damage we see to our fiber plant. From errant excavators to crazed squirrels, there are so many different ways to wreak havoc on our network, it boggles the imagination! August 4, 2011 By Fred Lawler

5/4/14 Observations of an Internet Middleman
Our Internet Services product sits on top of this global infrastructure: The orange lines are cable systems that Level 3 built and fully owns (the yellow lines are owned by multiple carriers or leased). That means thousands of miles of fiber in trenches across land and thousands of miles of fiber in cables on the seabed. In all, our network contains approximately 180,000 miles of fiber - enough to circle the equator seven times.
That fiber is then turned into usable bandwidth by installing equipment in data centers in each of those red and yellow dots, and also roughly every one hundred miles along each terrestrial cable. That bandwidth is then turned into an Internet Service by installing routers and switches in key locations. The Level 3 Internet Service consists of more than 10,000 Ethernet connections - getting bigger every month. The original invested capital in the Level 3 network was approximately $40 billion.

5/8/14 Comcast is the one who should pay for network connections, Cogent claims. Hearing on Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger brings up competition complaints. Internet backbone operator Cogent has long expressed its displeasure with Comcast's demands for payment in exchange for accepting Netflix video and other traffic. Comcast has argued that the data Netflix sends into its network creates an imbalance that should be rectified by payments from Netflix and its transit providers like Cogent. Netflix decided to pay Comcast—but Cogent has held out. Today, Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer made a different argument, saying that Comcast is the one who should be paying for connectivity.

An Educator's Guide to School Networks

Networks

  • DDoS Attack
  • HUBS AND SPOKES
    GLOBAL INTERNET PRIMER
    IN THE BEGINNING ARPANET NCC (Network Control Center) lived at BBN. Real people with a real phone number to call for network-related problems.
  • BROADBAND BANDWITH discussion includes Subsea System Failures
  • Net-Neutrality Internet Pioneers Discuss Net Neutrality 2009
  • About PORTS What are they? Which ones are used for trojans?
  • The Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ) is published quarterly by Cisco Systems. The journal is not intended to promote any specific products or services, but rather is intended to serve as an informational and educational resource for engineering professionals involved in the design, development, and operation of public and private internets and intranets. The journal carries tutorial articles ("What is...?") as well as implementation / operation articles ("How to..."). It provides readers with technology and standardization updates for all levels of the protocol stack and serves as a forum for discussion of all aspects of internetworking. Internet Protocal Journal subscription information


Resources

  • 2013 Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG) in Bridgetown, Barbados.
  • 2013 The largest computer attack on the Internet, causing widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world. Spam fighting group, called Spamhaus (good guy), added the Dutch company Cyberbunker (bad guy) to its blacklist.
  • The Cook Report has been published since 1992 by the former Director of the US Congress OffiIt monitors the increasing convergence between voice and data networks as it follows the technologies that are being used by the next generation telcos. ce of Technology Assessment of the NREN.
  • "Measurement Studies of End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet" where we are trying to track information from measurement studies about how end-to-end congestion control is actually doing in the Internet.
  • Guerilla researcher creates a botnet
    In one of the more audacious and ethically questionable research projects in recent memory, an anonymous hacker built a botnet of more than 420,000 Internet-connected devices and used it to perform one of the most comprehensive surveys ever to measure the insecurity of the global network.
    In all, the nine-month scanning project found 420 million IPv4 addresses that responded to probes and 36 million more addresses that had one or more ports open. A large percentage of the unsecured devices bore the hallmarks of broadband modems, network routers, and other devices with embedded operating systems that typically aren't intended to be exposed to the outside world. The researcher found a total of 1.3 billion addresses in use, including 141 million that were behind a firewall and 729 million that returned reverse domain name system records. There were no signs of life from the remaining 2.3 billion IPv4 addresses. All data collected during the Internet Census 2012 is available for download via BitTorrent. It is released into public domain so everybody can use it for any purpose. For an explanation of what this data is and how it was obtained,

    Carna Botnet Internet Census 2012 Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices

  • MAWI working group Traffic Archive
  • Monitor the link traffic for both average and peak rates, FIND link congestion and duration.

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE ON THE NET?

*The following lists the top ten language in use on the Internet, and how rapidly they grew from 2000 to 2005.
Given how little the .com boomers paid attention to the fact the Internet had already reached 50% of the United States back when, I should warn you that NONE of the listings below can double the percentage again once they have gotten close to 50% penetration!
I know this seems obvious, but somehow all those billionaires in the .com boom figured out a way to miss it, went down in flames!

Take English, for example:

At a 28% penetration level, even if you managed to get every one of the English speaking people in the world on the Internet from 2005-2010, the next such study could NOT show two more doublings of this percentage. . .at 25% you will just barely theoretically be able to double twice more, but that's only theoretically.

China, at just over 9% could double only three more times, but a fourth doubling would be impossible. . .however, just ONE double from now will likely put Chinese ahead of English as the default language of the most Internet users.

Chinese Doubling
9%
18%
36%
72%

Even Dutch, at only 1.5% of the world, can never double again, as their penetration is already well over 50%, as are various Scandinavian languages that have high penetration but too low a population to make such charts.

The Top Ten Languages Used in the Web
(Number of Users of the Internet by Language)
972,828,001 World Internet Users, All Languages 100%
% of all World Internet Users 6,420,102,722

World Population Estimate for All Languages

  • 15.2% Internet Penetration of All Language
  • 169.5% Internet Growth For All Languages (2000 - 2005)
  • 310,743,832 Internet Users, English Language

31.9% English % of all World Internet Users
1,107,807,851 World Population Estimate for English Language
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
28.1% Internet Penetration of English Language
126.6% Internet Growth For English Language (2000 - 2005)
124,301,513 Internet Users, Chinese Language
12.8% Chinese % of all World Internet Users
1,329,801,131 World Population Estimate for Chinese Language
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
9.3% Internet Penetration of Chinese Language
284.8% Internet Growth For Chinese Language (2000 - 2005)
78,050,000 World Internet Users, Japanese Language
8.0% Japanese % of all World Internet Users
128,137,485 World Population Estimate for Japanese Language

6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
60.9% Internet Penetration of Japanese Language
65.8% Internet Growth For Japanese Language (2000 - 2005)

62,959,431 World Internet Users, Spanish Language
6.5% Spanish % of all World Internet Users
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
389,587,559 World Population Estimate for Spanish Language
16.2% Internet Penetration of Spanish Language
159.7% Internet Growth For Spanish Language (2000 - 2005)

40,124,900 World Internet Users, French Language
4.1% French % of all World Internet Users
374,555,140 World Population Estimate for French Language
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
10.7% Internet Penetration of French Language
228.9% Internet Growth For French Language (2000 - 2005)

32,570,000 World Internet Users, Korean Language
3.3% Korean % of all World Internet Users
73,044,495 World Population Estimate for Korean Language
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
44.6% Internet Penetration of Korean Language
228.9% Internet Growth For Korean Language (2000 - 2005)

28,870,000 World Internet Users, Italian Language
3.0% Italian % of all World Internet Users
58,608,565 World Population Estimate for Italian Language
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
49.3% Internet Penetration of Italian Language
118.7% Internet Growth For Italian Language (2000 - 2005)

28,792,000 World Internet Users, Portuguese Language
3.0% Italian % of all World Internet Users
227,628,673 World Population Estimate for Italian Language
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
12.6% Internet Penetration of Italian Language
280.0% Internet Growth For Italian Language (2000 - 2005)

14,655,328 World Internet Users, Dutch Language
1.5% Dutch % of all World Internet Users
24,685,673 World Population Estimate for Dutch Language
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
59.5% Internet Penetration of Dutch Language
171.2% Internet Growth For Dutch Language (2000 - 2005)

776,280,399 World Internet Users, Top Ten Languages
79.8% Top Ten % of all World Internet Users
3,809,997,729 World Population Estimate for Top Ten Languages
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
20.4% Internet Penetration of Top Ten Languages
138.3% Internet Growth For Top Ten Languages (2000 - 2005)
196,547,602 World Internet Users, Other Languages
20.2% Other Language % of all World Internet Users
2,610,104,993 World Population Estimate for Other Languages
6,420,102,722 World Population Estimate for All Languages
7.5% Internet Penetration of Other Languages
459.0% Internet Growth For Other Language (2000 - 2005)
(*) NOTES: (1) Internet Top Ten Languages Usage Stats were updated on November 30, 2005. (2) Internet Penetration is the ratio between the sum of Internet users speaking a language and the total population estimate that speaks that referred language. (3) The most recent Internet usage information comes from data published by Nielsen//NetRatings, International Telecommunications Union, Computer Industry Almanac, and other reliable sources. (4) World population information comes from the world gazetteer web site. (5) For definitions and navigation help, see the Site Surfing Guide. (6) Stats may be cited, stating the source and establishing an active link back to Internet World Stats. )Copyright 2005, Miniwatts International, Ltd. All rights reserved.

Examples for data interpretation:
- There are 62,959,431 Spanish speaking people using the Internet, this represents 6.5 % of all the Internet users.
- Out of the estimated 389,587,559 world population that speaks Spanish, 16.2 % use the Internet.
- The number of Spanish Speaking Internet Users has grown 159.7 % in the last five years (2000-2005).

2005 United States
296,208,476 Population (Est. 2005)
203,576,811 Internet Users
68.7% % Population (Penetration)
90.8 % % Users in North America
113.5 % % Use Growth ( 2000-2005 )

2010 United States
307,212,123 Population (Est. 2010)
234,372,000 Internet Users

76.3 % % Population (Penetration)
90.8 % % Users in North America
145.8 % % Use Growth ( 2000-2009 )

NOTES:
(1) Internet Usage and Population Statistics for North America were updated on November 21, 2005.
(2) CLICK on country names to see detailed data for individual countries and regions.
(3) Population numbers are based on data contained in world gazetteer.
(4) The most recent usage comes mainly from data published by Nielsen//NetRatings, ITU , and other local sources.
(5) Data on this site may be cited, giving due credit and establishing an active link back to Internet World Stats .
(6) For definitions and help, see the site surfing guide. )Copyright 2005, Miniwatts International, Ltd. All rights
reserved.

Also From: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Listing by Continent, in alphabetica order:
World Internet Statistics
6,420,102,722 World Population (Est. 2005)
Current World Population
[Available Weekly in PT1b of the Project Gutenberg Newsletter]
100% Population % of World
972,828,001 Internet Usage
15.2% % Population (Penetration)
100.0% Usage % of World
169.5% Usage Growth 2000-2005

Africa Internet Statistics
896,721,874 Africa Population (Est. 2005)
14.0% Africa's Population % of World
23,917,500 African Internet Usage
2.7% % African Population (Penetration)
2.5% African Usage % of World
429.8% African Usage Growth 2000-2005

Asia Internet Statistics
3,622,994,130 Asian Population (Est. 2005)
56.4% Asian Population % of World
332,590,713 Asian Internet Usage
9.2% % Asian Population (Penetration)
34.2% Asian Usage % of World
191.0% Asian Usage Growth 2000-2005

Europe Internet Statistics
804,574,696 European Population (Est. 2005)
12.5% European Population % of World
285,408,118 European Internet Usage
35.5% % European Population (Penetration)
29.3% European Usage % of World
171.6% European Usage Growth 2000-2005

Middle East Internet Statistics
187,258,006 Middle Eastern Population (Est. 2005)
2.9% Middle Eastern Population % of World
16,163,500 Middle Eastern Internet Usage
8.6% % Middle Eastern Population (Penetration)
1.7% Middle Eastern Usage % of World
392.1% Middle Eastern Usage Growth 2000-2005

North America Internet Statistics
328,387,059 North American Population (Est. 2005)
5.1% North American Population % of World
224,103,811 North American Internet Usage
68.2% % North American Population (Penetration)
23.0% North American Usage % of World
107.3% North American Usage Growth 2000-2005

Latin America/Caribbean Internet Statistics
546,723,509 Latin America/Caribbean Population (Est. 2005)
8.5% Latin America/Caribbean Population % of World
72,953,597 Latin America/Caribbean Internet Usage
13.3% % Latin America/Caribbean Population (Penetration)
7.5% Latin America/Caribbean Usage % of World
303.8% Latin America/Caribbean Usage Growth 2000-2005

Oceania / Australia Internet Statistics
33,443,448 Oceanian / Australian Population (Est. 2005)
0.5% Oceanian / Australian Population % of World
17,690,762 Oceanian / Australian Internet Usage
52.9% % Oceanian / Australian Population (Penetration)
1.8% Oceanian / Australian Usage % of World
132.2% Oceanian / Australian Usage Growth 2000-2005

NOTES:
(1) Internet Usage and World Population Statistics were updated on November 21, 2005.
(2) CLICK on each world region for detailed regional information.
(3) Demographic (Population) numbers are based on data contained in the world-gazetteer website.
(4) Internet usage information comes from data published by Nielsen//NetRatings, by the International Telecommunications Union, by local NICs, and by other other reliable sources.
(5) For definitions, disclaimer, and navigation help, see the Site Surfing Guide.
(6) Information from this site may be cited, giving due credit and establishing an active link back to www.internetworldstats.com.