Author: admini

Commercial websites are very much on their own when it comes to protecting themselves against a flood of traffic that can deliberately knock their business offline for days at a time during a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.

What ISPs currently offer as standard is stone-age in terms of sophistication and more centred on protecting the ISP’s network than cleaning out DDoS traffic and ensuring that legitimate traffic reaches the affected sites.

DDoS attacks are not a problem at the core, where we have acres of bandwidth, but as it gets out to the edge, where the routers and switching hardware is less substantial, then it can be quite damaging. ACLs, or Access Control Lists, summarily block access to the network from ranges of IP addresses containing DDoS traffic, or to the target URL. But this blanket approach makes no allowance for legitimate traffic, and partially accomplishes the DDoS attackers’ goal, in rendering the target site unavailable or unusable. Neither the ISP or victim are satisfied with the results.

One online gambling site, for example, uses DDoS mitigation specialist Prolexic to direct traffic through its datacentres when under attack. It’s expensive, but not as expensive as losing literally millions of pounds in unplaced bets if – over a key sporting weekend – the site is taken down by an attack. It’s a gamble they can’t afford to lose. Chris Tolson, Infrastructure Manager at a large online gambling company, said: ‘We would struggle to handle with our current bandwidth constraints and the hardware we have in place to fight an attack. It is vital that legitimate traffic continues to come through to our website even while we’re under attack and we do not know of anyone other than Prolexic who can ensure this with today’s increasingly strong and tenacious attacks,’ he added.

Keith Laslop, president of Prolexic said: ‘I’ve seen them on forums where you can hire bots for next to nothing.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/security/news/98815/bt-to-make-ddos-mitigation-affordable.html

“SMEs have to realize that just because they are small, it doesn’t mean they won’t be targeted. Bad guys target wherever they can get money. Individuals working on peer-to-peer networks often don’t realize they’re sharing the whole contents of their drive. You can find Homeland Security vulnerability assessment documents online from employees (using P2P).”

However, Schmidt said that SMEs will eventually start using managed software security services, with third-party providers managing both low-cost application level security and end-point hardware. They want automatically self-healing and self-configuring software,” said Schmidt.

Small businesses must take security into account in their planning and decide whether to outsource security, invest in training or allocate more resources. If a small enterprise does have a full-time IT manager, that manager should become familiar with security standards such as ISO 17799, he said.

McMurdie said that computer security should follow common-sense procedures.

http://news.com.com/Small+companies+ignorant+of+security/2100-7355_3-6137381.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc

“There has been a lot of spending on network security, but the perception is there is not a lot of risk in that area,” says Forrester senior analyst Tim Sheedy. Sheedy claims that in a few years IT security will be measured much like other business metrics. Businesses will be able to factor in the actual information security risk, based on factors such as employee behaviour, system readiness and the financial ramifications of employees who expose an organization’s most sensitive information — either willingly or by accident. “Putting actual metrics — and particularly financial metrics — around security is going to be a major trend,” Sheedy said.

By 2010, says Pullen, industries like retail, construction and finished goods will have to deal with the same online nasties that plague online banking today — and most won’t be ready.

“In 37 months time I think there will be a public company either forced into chapter 11 (US bankruptcy code) or forced into bankruptcy in Australia because of a security breach that either resulted in goods being stolen from them or an incident with such an impact a company is forced to shut down,” he said.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=security&articleId=9005164&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_feat&WT.svl=bestoftheweb1