Experts Chart Spike in Cyber Sieges

[steven johnson]

Source: Washington Post

Friday, May 1, 2009; 11:42 AM
Cyber attacks with enough firepower to knock entire countries off the Internet have spiked in recent months, raising fresh concerns within the security community about weaknesses in the Internet infrastructure that help create such weapons of mass disruption.
These "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attacks use robot networks or "botnets" -- many hundreds or thousands of compromised PCs -- to flood targets with so much junk traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors.

While DDoS attacks have been a common threat since the dawn of the commercial Internet, DDoS watchers, such as Arbor Networks, have tracked a recent spike in the number, sophistication and size of attacks against major Internet providers. Attackers also appear to be picking bigger targets.

"We've certainly seen in last 120 days an uptick in critical infrastructure impacting attacks," said Danny McPherson, Arbor's chief security officer. "Suffice it to say, 'interesting' activity in this area has indeed increased from our perspective over the past 6 months or so, and the virulence of infrastructure attacks continues to be evident."


For example, an attacker can instruct a handful of compromised systems to query thousands of DNS servers, telling each to look up the location of washingtonpost.com, but send the answer back to someone else. This type of assault allows the attacker to trick DNS servers around the world into sending replies back to a third-party target, effectively making the DNS servers themselves foot soldiers in the attack.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/01/AR2009050101593.html?hpid=moreheadlines

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Cyber war and cyber extortion have both utilized distributed denial of service. Bots high jacking remote computers, like Conficker, are very cunning.

http://www.computerworld.com/spring/pages/article.htm?articleId=9131270

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194605