Re: Strange pings from akamai? {1-112POX}

[Customer Care at Akamai <ccare () akamai com>]

Hi Jeff,

This is Kevin from Customer Care at Akamai Technologies.  I noticed your
email to this list and wanted to respond to your message.

Akamai Technologies is a content delivery company that serves HTTP and
streaming content for many of the most popular Internet web-sites. Akamai's
network consists of 12,900+ servers in over 1000 networks across 66
countries. Our patented "intelligent" algorithms dynamically map a user
request to the closest (network-wise) available Akamai server. 

Our company sometimes does some research on internet connectivity using
pings.  The goal of our research is to improve download times for end users.
We use standard pings and take measures to ensure there is no risk of a ping
flood attack.  The ping activity is intended to try to triangulate the
location of nameservers with respect to our datacenters in order to provide
end users with better performance when they download web pages which are
being carried on the Akamai network.  

We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.  I will send you a
separate email with a custom URL for you to enter your IP address should you
wish to be excluded from our testing.

I hope this information helps.

- Kevin
-------------------------------------
Customer Care 
Akamai Technologies
ccare () akamai com

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Kell [mailto:jeff-kell () utc edu]
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 11:34 PM
To: Incidents
Subject: Strange pings from akamai?


Out of the wild blue, I logged some unexpected pings:

209.92.223.82:0(209-92-223-82.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com) ICMP Ping

Now I know they do lots of click-thru and banner ads, but is Akamai now
starting to keep tabs on our online time?  or something more sinister?

This was logged on my home computer firewall, I wasn't even here.  I
don't bother with logging pings at the office so I don't know if this 
is widespread or I just happened to be singled out for some reason.

Anyone else seen this?

Jeff

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