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Online Attacks Getting Bigger, Stronger, Says Report

by Dan Reilly on November 11, 2008 at 02:12 PM


Cyber criminals have proven again and again that they're a step or two ahead of the law enforcement and computer techs that are trying to stop them, but a new report says criminals aren't restraining themselves to viruses and shady emails. The survey shows that distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks are increasing in number and potency and could threaten the largest Web sites and networks. DDOS attacks use botnets, a string of infected computers, to overload and crash servers, and they have been used in political and military conflicts, as well as garden-variety Internet schemes.

Arbor Networks, a network security company, conducted a survey of 70 of the largest service providers in the world, and Arbor says that the size of attacks has increased over the last seven years from less than half a megabit to 40 gigabits. According to Arbor, most businesses have one gigabit connections or less, so even a relatively small DDOS attack can bring them down. Companies are responding by adding capacity to their networks, but it's still plausible that a large attack will succeed.

Another eye-opener in the report is that 58-percent of the surveyed operators hadn't referred any attacks to law enforcement in the last year. The reasons? Some said the law isn't equipped to deal with it, others thought customers should be the ones reporting it, and still others just didn't see the point. And they wonder why criminals consistently have the upper hand? [Source: New York Times]

Tags: botnet, ddos, denial of service, DenialOfService, safety, security, web

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