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Hackers will rapidly go after these high value targets with attacks that are highly automated and, if they are not yielding useful payloads, the attackers are equipped to quickly try a different type of attack. This is why it is important to have an understanding of the kind of traffic that is accessing your hosted infrastructure, so that you can make sure that malicious traffic is diverted and that there is less risk to sensitive data,” he added.

Throughout the whole year, FireHost has blocked over 64 million malicious cyberattacks of all types, with Cross-Site Scripting being the most prolific Superfecta attack type overall, clocking in at 5.4 million blocked attacks.

As in Q3 2012, Europe is still the second most likely origin point for malicious traffic blocked by FireHost after North America, being the source of 13 percent of attacks.

The risks to businesses from the Superfecta varies and depends upon the kind of data that could be stolen in the event of a successful attack, according to Todd Gleason, Director of Technology at FireHost, “Itʼs fairly obvious that, if you are retailer or service provider dealing with private customer data or payment card details, your business will present an attractive target for hackers.

Link: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14320

DDoS first reared its ugly head in the late 1990s and early 2000s as simple, financially-motivated, brute force attacks in which hackers would attempt to overwhelm network and data center operators with external communication requests, causing system overloads and crashes. Over the years, DDoS attacks have grown in sophistication and efficiency, moving from heavy-handed hardware overloads to application-layer attacks that could look like legitimate network traffic, making it much more difficult to detect and defeat the threat.

“What we’ve seen with the most recent attacks is that it isn’t about how big the attack is – because they weren’t the biggest attacks – it’s about how smart they are,” Moynahan said.

Adding to the challenge is the proliferation of “bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) business models in which companies encourage their employees to use their own smart phones, tablets, and other devices for work, giving hackers more entry points into networks.

To meet the new threats head on, Arbor is going beyond the conventional and increasingly outmoded method of using firewalls and other basic network protection methods that can eventually require too much bandwidth and infrastructure, compromising network availability. To provide its clients with end-to-end traffic visibility to monitor the DDoS threat landscape and minimize risk, Arbor employs a number of solutions, including a new cloud-based active threat level analysis system called ATLAS — a collaborative project in which Arbor clients share anonymous traffic data totaling almost 40 terabytes per second to spot malware and botnet threats across the Internet.

Link: http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2013/01/report-ddos-attacks-harder-to-detect.html?ana=RSS&s=article_search&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bizj_boston+%28Boston+Business+Journal%29&page=all