Hello and welcome to the Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 edition of the Sands Internet Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Orich, recording today from Jacksonville, Florida.

And this episode is brought you by the Sands.edu graduate certificate program in incident response.

I mentioned yesterday talking about the compromise of the Chinese standard time servers, that we have

been collecting data about pool.n.tp.org. These are the NTP servers that are basically

an open project. Everybody can contribute their time server to it, to make it easy to synchronize

your time. And a lot of systems, in particular Linux systems, tend to use these NTP servers as their default.

Now, took some time today to go over the data that we have collected

just to see how accurate those time servers are,

and it turns out they are very accurate.

I had to use a double logarithmic scale to really show anything here, but a real tight spike.

Most of these, and we're talking here about more than 90% of the servers have an accuracy of

less than 10 milliseconds, and pretty much all of them are less than 100 milliseconds.

So that certainly is sufficient for most sort of small business, home networks and the like

to synchronize your time. And again, remember there are two parts to it. This is the synchronization

to the external time standard. And then of course,

you also have your internal synchronization. The other thing here is you can contribute your

own time server if you want to, but they put a little bit of warning out here that once

you commit to it, you should better stick to it because, well, people will keep querying your

time server even if they can't reach it. Also added a link to the feed that we have,

where basically you can look at the data yourself and check it out and see, you know,

if you see any oddities or such in this data, but also having a list of NTP servers,

...