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

walrus01 · hn · 2026-09-14

A classic 2003 postmortem resurfaced on Hacker News: buggy Netgear router firmware hardcoded the University of Wisconsin's NTP server address, causing countless devices to flood it with SNTP sync requests — an accidental DDoS-like event. The writeup details the diagnosis, vendor outreach, and mitigation, and became an early precedent for later NTP abuse research.

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