internet background radiation

Network telescopes collect and record unsolicited Internet-wide traffic destined to a routed but unused address space usually referred to as “Darknet” or “blackhole” address space. Among the largest network telescopes in the US, Merit Network operates one that receives unsolicited internet traffic on around 475k unused IP addresses. On an average day, the network telescope receives approximately 41.5k packets per second and around 17M bits per second. Description of the attached dataset:

1. Data Source:

This dataset results from a 5-month-long Cloud Telescope Internet Background Radiation collection experiment conducted during the months of October 2023 until February 2024.
A total amount of 130 EC2 instances (sensors) were deployed across all the 26 commercially available AWS regions at the time,  5 sensors per region.
A Cloud Telescope sensor does not serve information. All traffic arriving to the sensor is unsolicited, and potentially malicious. Sensors were configured to allow all unsolicited traffic.

This dataset results from a 47-day Cloud Telescope Internet Background Radiation collection experiment conducted during the months of August and September 2023. A total amount of 260 EC2 instances (sensors) were deployed across all the 26 commercially available AWS regions at the time, 10 sensors per region. A Cloud Telescope sensor does not serve information. All traffic arriving to the sensor is unsolicited, and potentially malicious. Sensors were configured to allow all unsolicited traffic.

This dataset results from a month-long cloud-based Internet Background Radiation observation conducted in May 2023.
A sensor fleet comprised of 26 EC2 compute instances was deployed within Amazon Web Services across their 26 commercially available regions, 1 sensor per region.

The dataset contains 21,856,713 incoming packets, out of which 17,008,753 are TCP datagrams, 3,076,855 are ICMP packets and the remainder, 1,770,418 are UDP messages.