Opinion: Don't be an accidental vandal

In 2005, the operator of one of the top-level Network Time Protocol (NTP) time servers in Denmark noticed that a large volume of requests hitting his server were invalid.

The NTP is one of those very useful and often ignored internet services that lets you keep the clocks of all your machines in sync. Synchronized clocks make log analysis much more straightforward, so a good clock is essential for security services. Anyway, back to the story. It turned out that the suspect requests were all using an old and deprecated version of the protocol. And there were a lot of them: more than three million connections from over 250,000 different machines. Smelling a rat, the operator decided to investigate further. After a bit of detective work, he discovered ...
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