November 11, 2008
Online Attacks Continue to Grow and Become More Diverse, Survey Finds
Large-scale attacks on computer networks are growing significantly, according to Arbor Networks’ Fourth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, released this morning. At the same time, the types of attacks are becoming more diverse and more sophisticated, the report says.
The report, which can be downloaded free from the company’s Web site, is based on a survey of network operators that included a number of academic organizations. Almost a third of those surveyed said that fighting spam consumes the most resources, followed by preventing threats from “constant background activity” (such as worms and scans) and avoiding distributed denial-of-service attacks. Looking ahead to the next 12 months, the network operators said they were most worried about attacks from bots and botnets and from DNS-cache poisoning.
The increasing scale of distributed denial-of-service attacks is particularly noteworthy, the report says. “From relatively humble megabit beginnings in 2000, the largest DDoS attacks have now grown a hundredfold to break the 40-gigabit barrier this year,” the report says. “The growth in attack size continues to significantly outpace the corresponding increase in underlying transmission speed and ISP-infrastructure investment.”
Five percent of network operaters surveyed said they had experienced attacks over 10 gigabits per second, and 30 percent said they had suffered attacks in the 1-to-4-gigabit-per-second range. —Lawrence Biemiller
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dolby
— arakan Nov 12, 04:33 AM #