Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server (2003)

In mid-May 2003 the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s public time server was overwhelmed by a flood of 76-byte UDP packets to port 123, all originating from source port 23457, causing inbound traffic to peak at roughly 40 kpps. The surge was traced to a flaw in Netgear SNTP client firmware, prompting the university to block the offending traffic at WiscNet’s border routers and to coordinate with Netgear for code upgrades affecting multiple Netgear products.