DDoS attacks become mainstream in 2010

PanARMENIAN.Net - According to Arbor Networks’ Sixth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, 2010 should be viewed as the year distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks became mainstream as many high profile attacks were launched against popular Internet services and other well known targets.

The year also witnessed a sharp escalation in the scale and frequency of DDoS attack activity on the Internet. The 100 Gbps attack barrier was reached for the first time while application layer attacks hit an all-time high. Service providers experienced a marked impact on operational expense, revenue loss and customer churn as a result, according to a report issued today by Arbor Networks, a leading provider of security and network management solutions for converged carrier networks and next-generation data centers.

Botnet-driven DDoS attacks are likely to continue as a low cost, high-profile form of cyber-protest in 2011 and beyond. Major incidents in 2010 included DDoS attacks associated with the territorial disputes between China and Japan, the ongoing political turmoil in Burma and Sri Lanka and the WikiLeaks affair. The need to protect availability has finally made it onto the radar screen of enterprise IT consulting firms worldwide, and DDoS defense has consequently reached the status of a CXO-level issue globally.

The DDoS attack surface describes all aspects of network infrastructure, servers, protocols and services that are vulnerable to DDoS attacks. As new equipment, protocols and services are introduced into networks, the vulnerable attack surface for DDoS is expanded. This presents a significant challenge for network operators. Botnet-driven volumetric and application-layer DDoS attacks continue to be the most significant problems facing operators. This year’s report also reveals attackers are targeting the infrastructure itself, specifically DNS, VoIP and IPv6.

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.