[ISN] Botnets ovetake DDoS attacks as ISP fear, says Arbor Networks

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Mon Sep 17 2007 - 22:21:00 PDT


http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/09/17/226806/botnets-ovetake-ddos-attacks-as-isp-fear-says-arbor.htm

By Antony Savvas
17 Sep 2007

Arbor Networks' Third Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report 
highlights botnets and the increased size of distributed denial of 
service (DDoS) attacks as a growing threat to ISPs.

For the first time, botnets surpassed DDoS attacks as the top threat 
identified by service providers.

Arbor Networks says it has security customer relationships with more 
than 70% of the global service provider community, which enabled it to 
gather input from 70 tier-1, tier-2 and hybrid IP network operators in 
North America, Europe and Asia for the report.

The report covers the 12-month period from July 2006 through to June 
2007.

This year, a much larger percentage of the respondent pool believed bots 
and botnets to be a larger threat than DDoS attacks. Bots are PCs 
remotely taken over by hackers without the knowledge of their owners and 
are usually linked together to form botnets to spread malware and spam.

The threat of DDoS attacks still looms large for ISPs though. Although 
mid-level DDoS attacks have plagued the internet since 2000, survey 
respondents reported a widening gap between common mid-level "amateur" 
attacks and multi-gigabit "professional" efforts involving tens of 
thousands of bot hosts.

Most surveyed ISPs reported significant improvements in the 
sophistication and coordination of DDoS attacks.

In addition, says the report, voice over IP services are vulnerable with 
a lack of security protection across ISPs. The report found that only 
20% of ISPs currently have specific tools or mechanisms to monitor and 
detect threats against VoIP services.


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