Internet-based security incidents and the potential for false alarms

The paper explains the background to experimental work that was conducted w ith the aim of measuring aspects of the WWW (specifically the average lifet ime of a web link and the impact of the "Millennium Bug"), but which inadve rtently caused two perceived security breaches on remote systems. The paper explains the nature of these incidents and considers why, when over 700,00 0 IP addresses were randomly sampled in the experimental study, only two si tes considered the activity to be an attempt to breach their security. It i s concluded that, while the appropriate protection of Internet-based system s is undoubtedly of importance, the problems experienced during the experim ental study suggest a lack of uniformity in what different organisations wi ll class as a security breach.