heaviest brute force attacks

From November 2008

By Nick Heath silicon.com
Posted on ZDNet News: Nov 12, 2008 4:32:08 AM

Online networks suffered their heaviest brute force attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault.

IP networks were bombarded by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – attempts to make networks unreachable by flooding them with traffic – as intense as 40Gbps, a survey of 70 IP network operators worldwide has claimed.

( Gigabits per second, a data transfer speed measurement, transfer rates, a gigabit equals 1,000,000,000 bits. so 40 Gbps is 40,000,000,000, thats 40 billion bits a second. G)

The report by Arbor Networks says that the largest sustained attacks in the last two years were 24 Gbps and 17 Gbps, a 67 per cent increase in attack scale over last year.

A total of 36 per cent of respondents suffered sustained attacks larger than 1Gbps last year and the number suffering attacks of this type doubled in 2008.

Botnets continue to be the main vehicle used to disrupt network operations - accounting for 26 per cent of attacks - followed by DNS cache poisoning.

Chief security officer for Arbor Networks Danny McPherson said the growth in attack size continues to "significantly outpace" the corresponding increase in underlying transmission speed and infrastructure investment.

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Badges: I don' need any stickin badges,

or Internet, I can grow my own food and cut my own fire wood.

What do I need the Internet for?

G

Fake security software sites.

Chinese hackers join al Qaeda

Cyber Threat matrix

The Truth about Internet Security

.Can you say "cyber pearl

harbor"? G

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

For years, researchers with the nonprofit Open Security Foundation have been scouring press reports, bank websites and other sources for information on consumer data spills, tallying more than 394 million records lost or compromised in 1,700 incidents since 2000.

Experts say this work is increasingly important. Despite laws in more than three dozen states requiring companies to disclose breaches, many still go unreported, and there is no government agency that compiles reliable statistics on breaches to help the public get a clear picture of the scope of the problem. That's left to volunteer-managed databases like the foundation's DataLoss.

"What's really exciting to me about this database is it's the first time we've actually had insight into what goes wrong on anything other than an anecdotal level," says breach-expert Adam Shostack, a senior program manager in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Division. "I've been working in security for nearly two decades, and stuff has been going wrong all that time. No one ever talked about it. No one ever wanted to give you any details. The value of DataLoss is that it gets us to understanding what's going wrong for these organizations."

By late January, it was becoming clear to the Open Security Foundation that something, somewhere had gone very wrong indeed. The fact that banks recalling debit cards were in different states initially made the researchers suspect a breach at a major retailer — something on par with the TJX breach in 2005 and 2006. But soon they became certain it was something even more serious. The banks evidently had no clue, and were distributing conflicting information.( no surprise there.G)

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