ABSTRACT

In early January 2001, a new Web page was launched. It

was named Netscan,[1] and the creators had done quite a

bit of work prior to launching their Web site. Actually,

the work was quite simple, but time-consuming. They had

pinged the entire routed IPv4 address space; or to be more

exact, they pinged every IP address ending with .0 or

.255. For each PING sent, they expected one PING

REPLY in return. And for each network that replied

with more than one packet, they counted the number of

replies and put the data into a database. All networks that

did reply with more than one packet for each packet sent

were considered to be an amplifier network. After pinging

the entire Internet (more or less), they published on their

Web site a list of the 1024 worst networks, including the

e-mail address for the person responsible for the IP

address and its associated network. The worst networks

were those networks that gave them the highest number

of replies to a single PING, or the best amplification

effect.