ISPs in trouble, DDoS and Targeted Attacks

The fourth edition of Arbor’s Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, was published last week. The report distilling responses from around 70 ISPs in North America, South America, Europe and Asia, mentions that brute force attacks are still a problem.

Let's have a look at some of the figures. The maximum peak that was seen in 2007 was 40Gbps when 2 rival cybercrime gangs attacked each other. But the largest sustained attacks that were seen, amounted to 24Gbps this year compared to 17Gbps last year.

About thirty percent of the ISPs in Arbor's survey saw sustained attacks of more than one Gbps. Attack growth rates are increasing faster than the growth in the transmission capacity of networks, according to Arbor.

But not only DDoS attacks are making it hard on the ISPs, there are also more targeted attacks like DNS cache poisoning (23 %) and BGP route hijacking (15 %). Another recent survey showed that 10% of all DNS server were still vulnerable (theregister.co.uk) to the DNS cache poisoning attack.

Last but not least, attacks on VoIP systems are also expected to be a challenge. Many operators don't yet have defenses with only 21% having attack countermeasures in place.

This edition of Arbor's Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report can be found here (registration required).

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(Photo under creative commons from Will Lion's photostream)