* A look at what the large ISPs are doing to thwart DDoS attacks
This week our Special Focus author (dpappalardo@nww.com) takes a look at the bane of the Internet: distributed denial of service attacks. The CERT Coordination Center for reporting Internet security problems run by Carnegie Mellon University backs up these claims. Through the end of September, there had been 114,855 security breaches, reported by users and ISPs, which is 32,761 more than all of 2002. These reports include all types of security policy violation from distributed DoS to a hacker attack.
Although the number and intensity of distributed DoS attacks are on the rise, users are hard pressed to find tangible new services to help thwart or defend against such assaults.
But the largest ISPs are doing more behind the scenes and are promising new tools by next year that will help predict and better defend against worms and viruses that act like distributed DoS attacks as well as true distributed DoS strikes.
While VPNs and managed firewall services are available from many ISPs, the primary goal of these offerings is to secure traffic that travels over the Internet. Intrusion detection services that include anomaly detection aimed at mitigating the effects of distributed DoS attacks are not commonly offered by the largest business ISPs. But that will likely change in the next 12 months.
MCI, like AT&T and Sprint, is testing new tools that are designed to detect distributed DoS attacks and worms and viruses that act like distributed DoS by trying to eat up a target’s bandwidth.
For example, AT&T says that it has built in some proactive, network-based security into its backbone and it’s looking at anomaly detection gear from Arbor. AT&T is looking at combining off-the-shelf tools with anti-distributed DoS technology that AT&T Labs has developed over the years.
Sprint is specifically focusing on distributed DoS mitigation and intrusion detection products that it plans to deploy in its backbone within the next year.
For more information on this article read: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/1117specialfocus.html
