http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/backscatter/index.xml
in case folks want to have more details
on this topic before their talk
(pretty interesting stuff...)
abstract
Inferring Internet Denial-of-Service Activity
David Moore
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)
San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of California, San Diego
Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
In this paper, we seek to answer a simple question: "How
prevalent are denial-of-service attacks in the Internet
today?". Our motivation is to understand quantitatively the
nature of the current threat as well as to enable longer-term
analyses of trends and recurring patterns of attacks. We
present a new technique, called "backscatter analysis", that
provides an estimate of worldwide denial-of-service activity.
We use this approach on three week-long datasets to assess the
number, duration and focus of attacks, and to characterize
their behavior. During this period, we observe more than 12,000
attacks against more than 5,000 distinct targets, ranging from
well known e-commerce companies such as Amazon and Hotmail to
small foreign ISPs and dial-up connections. We believe that our
work is the only publically available data quantifying
denial-of-service activity in the Internet.