Net bombarded by heaviest ever attacks this year

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.

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.

Security from A to Z

Click on the links below to find out more...

A is for Antivirus
B is for Botnets
C is for CMA
D is for DDoS
E is for Extradition
F is for Federated identity
G is for Google
H is for Hackers
I is for IM
J is for Jaschan (Sven)
K is for Kids
L is for Love Bug
M is for Microsoft
N is for Neologisms
O is for Orange
P is for Passwords
Q is for Questions
R is for Rootkits
S is for Spyware
T is for Two-factor authentication
U is for USB sticks/devices
V is for Virus variants
W is for Wi-fi
X is for OS X
Y is for You
Z is for Zero-day

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.