Today´s Usenet Usage: NNTP Traffic Characterization

The finding by Maier et al that Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) traffic is responsible for up to 5% of residential network traffic inspires us to revisit today´s Usenet usage. For this purpose we have developed an NNTP analyzer for the Bro network intrusion detection system. We find that NNTP is intensively used by a small fraction of the residential broadband lines that we study and that almost all traffic is to NNTP servers that require subscription for a monthly fee. The accessed content resembles what one might expect from file-sharing systems---archives and multimedia files. Accordingly, it appears that NNTP is used by some as a high performance alternative to traditional P2P file-sharing options such as eDonkey or BitTorrent.