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Telecommunications Arbor warns of surging network attacks
Telecommunications Arbor warns of surging network attacks | Arbor warns of surging network attacks |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Wednesday, 12 November 2008 | |
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According to Arbor, "In addition to a notable increase in the number of attacks against network infrastructure, this year's report also found that smaller and more sophisticated attacks – including service-level and application-targeted attacks, DNS poisoning, and route hijacking – are more difficult to manage than larger, brute force attacks and can cause a serious disruption in network service or enable further compromise." Danny McPherson, chief security officer for Arbor Networks, explained that: "Providers need to have deep application insight into IP services and applications – such as DNS, HTTP, VoIP, IM and P2P – in order to identify, and mitigate such attacks. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were as large as 40Gbps gigabits in the last year, whereas the largest sustained DDOS attacks reported in the last two years were 24Gbps and 17Gbps, respectively, representing a 67 percent increase in attack scale over last year and a 100-fold increase since 2001. "The growth in attack size continues to significantly outpace the corresponding increase in underlying transmission speed and infrastructure investment," said McPherson. "And, while most ISPs now have the infrastructure to detect bandwidth flood attacks, we found that many still lack the ability to quickly mitigate these attacks; only a small percentage of the providers we surveyed said they have the capability to mitigate DDoS attacks in 10 minutes or less." He added: "What's even more concerning is that even fewer providers have the infrastructure to defend against service-level attacks or this year's reported peak of a 40 gigabit flooding attack. This is an area of weakness for operators that can be exploited quickly." CONTINUED |
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