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ISPs Fear Monster 40Gbps DDoS Attacks
Attacks getting more sophisticated, while resources getting strained...
Several readers write in to note that Arbor Networks has released their 2008 Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, which picks the brains of roughly seventy engineers from tier 1 and 2 ISPs. Engineers were asked 90 questions about everything from backbone capacity to their workloads, and for the fourth straight year noted that the majority of their security resources and time are spent fighting DDoS attacks, which broke the 40Gbps threshold this year. Engineers say this year truly strained security resources at major ISPs:
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In the last four surveys, ISPs reportedly spent most of their available security resources combating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. For the first time, this year ISPs describe a far more diversified range of threats, including concerns over domain name system (DNS) spoofing, border gateway protocol (BGP) hijacking and spam. Almost half of the surveyed ISPs now consider their DNS services vulnerable. Others expressed concern over related service delivery infrastructure, including voice over IP (VoIP) session border controllers (SBCs) and load balancers.
Breaching the 40Gbps mark nearly doubled last year's DDoS threat, and Arbor warns that should it double again next year, many ISPs will be woefully unprepared to handle the threat. As is usually the case, ISP security departments say they're dealing with increasingly sophisticated threats while they deal with "fewer resources, less management support and increased workload."