http://www.techworld.com/networking/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4570 By John E. Dunn, Techworld 13 October 2005 Companies should devote more resources to countering old-fashioned DDoS attacks when investing in security, a survey of global ISPs (pdf) [1] has argued. The figures from Arbor Networks in its Worldwide ISP Security Report came from questionnaires sent to 36 large ISPs in the US, Europe and Asia. Over 90 percent of ISPs surveyed cited simple "brute force" TCP SYN and UDP datagram DDoS floods from zombie PC networks as their biggest day-to-day hassle, a finding which should apply equally to their corporate clients. This puts DDoS ahead of more recent attack types such as fast-spreading worms and DNS poisoning, which were ranked second and third respectively, in terms of prevalence. Even then, worm attacks were often most hazardous in terms of their original effect on traffic. "The primary threat from worms is not the payloads but the network congestion they cause," the report noted. Surprisingly, given the prevalence of this type of attack in recent years, only 29 percent of ISPs offered services to counter and trace DDoS in an automated way at the ISP level. The majority only discovered such events when a customer contacted them for help. The main means of defending against DDoS remains the use of Access Control Lists (ACLs), but these come with the downside of shutting off network access. The DDoS attack is stopped but only by replicating much the same effect as the original traffic blocking. The reported motivations for DDoS attacks clusters around issues such as cyber-extortion, electronic protests against companies, and even corporate espionage. Few, if any, of such attacks are reported to result in criminal action against the instigator, which could account for its continued popularity. [1] http://www.arbor.net/downloads/Arbor_Worldwide_ISP_Security_Report.pdf _________________________________________ InfoSec News v2.0 - Coming Soon! http://www.infosecnews.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Oct 13 2005 - 21:25:42 PDT