This holds the current throughput, formatted as a display string, of the byte rate the firewall is actively discarding because it matched a drop or reject rule (or was otherwise disallowed by policy) at this instant. Because it is a rate and not a cumulative counter, an admin can use it as a live early-warning gauge for an active scan or flood, since a spike here with no matching change in fwAcceptedBytesTotalRate points to unwanted traffic being generated against the gateway rather than a shift in legitimate demand. For example, a jump from a baseline of '5000' to '2500000' bytes/sec with no policy change is consistent with a port-scan or DoS burst hitting the perimeter.