Yep. It sounds like the packets were coming from this nic and the backbone routers had no logic to filter out those kinds of invalid packets. No SRC/DST/TTL should be a big red flag, but it seems like they didn't have a rule for that.

Talk about a needle in a hay stack.

Traditional IP filters are typically useless against packet storms because all of the packets are technically valid, there are just way too many of them.

I used to look after an office location that had three racks with older generation HP Procurve switches. About once every 4-6 months, the whole lot would go haywire and the only way to settle down the network was to switch them all off, wait, and then power up again. We never did track down the root cause and could never make it happen on demand,

Could be a totally valid solution ... for an equipment rental place. Pretty sure people died that didn't have to with this 911 outage.

Oh god, I had to deal with some procurve switches in a past life. They were a nightmare to manage and unreliable.

We actually ended up replacing them on 2 racks with 24port unmanaged gbit 3com ones we bought from some high street electronics shop one night during an outage... Not a fun memory..

(Of course, those were later replaced with some proper equipment)