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

In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that hundreds of thousands of flawed Netgear residential routers worldwide were flooding its Network Time Protocol server with hundreds of thousands of packets per second due to a serious design flaw in the routers' SNTP client implementation. Rather than a malicious attack, the flood resulted from these defective products improperly sending time synchronization requests to the university's public server. The university worked with Netgear on a multi-faceted solution involving code upgrades, internet routing techniques, and community notification to address the ongoing operational problem.