[ISN] Cyberattacks could have been mitigated

http://fcw.com/articles/2009/07/13/week-cyberattacks.aspx

By Ben Bain
FCW.com
July 09, 2009

Agencies and their service providers need better coordination to quickly 
stop the type of cyberattacks that recently targeted government Web 
sites, security experts say.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, which targeted a range 
of government and private-sector Web sites in the United States and 
South Korea, affected targets differently. Organizations that work 
closely with their service providers were able to sidestep the effects 
of the attacks more readily than those that don't, analysts say.

“Large banks in the United States have great relationships with service 
providers, so why doesn’t the U.S. government have a good relationship 
with their service providers to ensure that they can quickly turn the 
spigot off?” asked John Bumgarner, research director for security 
technology at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent research 
institute.

In recent years, large-scale DDOS attacks also hit Web sites in the 
nations of Estonia and Georgia. Those attacks and the recent incidents 
that targeted U.S. sites used botnets, in which computers, hijacked and 
controlled remotely, were used to overload systems, experts say. DDOS 
attacks are fairly simple cyberattacks, relying on sheer numbers to shut 
down Web sites.

[...]


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