New Powerful Web Attacks Expected

Posted on March 17, 2006

MSNBC.com reports that security experts have noticed an alarming "denial of service" attack on an Internet name server in South Africa. This particular attack was much more powerful and sent more data at the target sites than has previously been seen.

Ken Silva, the chief security officer for VeriSign Inc., compared the scale of attacks to the damage caused in October 2002 when nine of the 13 computer "root" servers that manage global Internet traffic were crippled by a powerful electronic attack.
VeriSign operates two of the 13 root server computers, but its machines were unaffected. "This is significantly larger than what we saw in 2002, by an order of magnitude," Silva said.
Silva said the attacks earlier this year used only about 6 percent of the more than 1 million name servers across the Internet to flood victim networks. Still, the attacks in some cases exceeded 8 gigabits per second, indicating a remarkably powerful electronic assault.
"This would be the Katrina of Internet storms," Silva said.

There is a new name for this kind of attack according to the article: "distributed reflector denial of service." It sounds bad. Hopefully the major U.S. name servers will enhance security to compensate for the possibility of this new type of attack.

SECURITY