Internet background noise

Internet background noise (IBN, also known as Internet background radiation, by analogy with natural background radiation) consists of data packets on the Internet which are addressed to IP addresses or ports where there is no network device set up to receive them. Network telescopes observe the Internet background radiation.

These packets often contain unsolicited commercial or network control messages, backscatters, port scans, and worm activities.

Smaller devices such as DSL modems may have a hard-coded IP address to look up the correct time using the Network Time Protocol. If, for some reason, the hard-coded NTP server is no longer available, faulty software might retry failed requests up to every second, which, if many devices are affected, generates a significant amount of unnecessary request traffic.