Global Cyber Alliance and measuring the bad traffic

PING

In this episode of PING, We’re talking to Leslie Daigle from the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) again, discussing GCA’s honeynet project. Leslie spoke with PING back in January 2024, and in this episode we re-visit things. Honeynets (or Honey farms) are deliberately weakly protected systems put online, to see what kinds of bad traffic exist out in the global Internet, where they come from and what kinds of attack they are mounting.

In the intervening period GCA has continued to develop its honeyfarm, building out it’s own systems images, and can now capture more kinds of bad traffic. They have also bedded in the MANRS community, which is now supported by GCA worldwide.

In this episode, Leslie is actually asking more questions than providing answers. If we accept that there is now a persisting problem at scale, what kinds of approaches do we need to take to “get on top” of bad traffic? It used to be we thought of this in terms of technical solutions but increasingly Leslie feels we now need to broaden the conversation and take this into Public policy and governance communities, to understand what kinds of social cost we can bear, and what socially driven objectives we want to drive to. The problem is, this is one of the tasks technologists are often the least equipped to do: Talk to people.

GCA is showcasing the AIDE system, reachable at https://gcaaide.org/ as a way of opening up the conversation with national strategic policy makers, and the wider community. It’s a simple economy & region model summarising the state of honeynet detected bad traffic levels worldwide, and helps to set an agenda with which the individual ISPs and routing-active community can engage, for their locus of control.

Read more about GCA, Honey nets, AIDE on the APNIC blog and the web:

• The invisible War: Why securing Internet Traffic is Everyone’s Responsibility (Leslie Daigle, APNIC Blog May 2025)
• Global Cyber Alliance measurements (Podcast, PING at APNIC Jan 2024)
• Dealing with the undercurrent of unwanted Traffic (Leslie Daigle, APNIC Blog October 2022)
• AIDE: Addressing unwanted Internet Traffic at it’s source (GCA Website)