Growing Number of Online Attacks Creating Trouble for Experts

As per a new report released by Arbor Network on online security, hackers have decided to close large sites; even the operators are guarding themselves with large digital fire hoses capable of capturing the largest network of world.

In these attacks, computer networks are captured to create botnets that circulate random packets of data in large volume across the net. The deluge of data is conducted to bring down sites and entire corporate networks. Also, the attack uses a technique known as reflective amplification, which enables a small number of attack systems to produce huge stream of data towards a victim.

Cyber weapons like DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are employed during political and military conflicts, as in Estonia during 2007 in a political fight with Russia, and in the Georgian-Russian war last summer. These attacks are also used in blackmail schemes and political conflict and for general harmful mischief.

In 2008, Flood-based attacks accounted for around 42% of the total discovered attacks and protocol exhaustion-based attacks represented 24%. Arbor Networks also witnessed a rapid increment in application- based attacks during 2008, representing 17% of the total attacks.

Arbor Networks claim that this shows a 67% rise in range of attacks against 2007 and almost two and half times the largest attack reported during 2006. Also, it is estimated to be a 100 fold increase since 2001. Further, even at the lower end of the sustained attack scale, almost 36% of survey respondents have claimed larger than 1 Gbps this year.

Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Arbor Networks, Rob Malan, says that DDOS attacks in 2008 surpassed the 40-gigabit barrier which was almost two times of attacks in 2007, as reported by cnetnews on November 11, 2008. Malan also cautioned that if next year's attacks double in number, most of the carriers will not be able to cope with them.

Further, in 2008, the ISPs pointed that the attacks are not only large in size but most of them are expanding the upper range of their security resources to tackle such attacks.

Related article: Growing Internet Fraud Reduces ‘E-Crime Education’ Success

» SPAMfighter News - 25-11-2008

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