How to Not be a Shamefully Bad Time Server Abuser

“Time server abuse is not perpetrated just by inexperienced
network administrators — the worst cases are from vendors of
networking devices. One might think that big companies all full of
engineers and other paid brainiacs would not commit such acts of
stupidity. But it has happened a number of times. Netgear was the
first famous NTP server abuser. In 2003 it released four routers
that were hard-coded to use the University of Wisconsin’s NTP
server. The result was a distributed denial-of-service attack that
continued to escalate, at one point reaching nearly 150 megabits
per second.

“Netgear released firmware updates and gave a big bag of money
to the University of Wisconsin, but the problem persists to this
day because most of the people who own the defective routers will
never patch them.”

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