Detecting Malformed or Misdirected Data

This application for monitoring black holes relies on monitoring traffic that does not seem to make any sense, but that still appears to reach a specific destination. To better illustrate the problem, allow me this digression.

In 1999, a group of friends, colleagues in Poland, and I began a humble after-hours project. Our goals were to track down a hard-to-explain set of RST+ACK packets that we had noticed arriving at networks we maintained and to monitor unusual and unsolicited traffic patterns arriving at unused network segments in general. It was great fun, and, as you might imagine, it resulted in a good deal of speculation when we tried to reasonably explain some of the most unusual cases. Our research ...

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