April 6th, 2005
Here is a great idea
An article appearing out of the UK today states in part:
Online gambling companies are urging ISPs to do more to prevent hackers disabling computers with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Quick refresher: Extortionists infect thousands of computers with remote control software (zombies, bots, Trojans) that allows them to execute targeted attacks against various e-commerce sites. They threaten the site with downtime or destruction unless they pay up. Those sites that do lots of transactions either have to pay up or find some sort of defense against massive distributed attacks.
So, it is a great idea for 1. everyone to ensure that they do not participate in these attacks by installing firewalls and AV products. And: 2. ISP’s to help their end users to install those defenses.
But I would suggest that the ISP’s could do a lot more. They should take responsibility for the packets that cross their networks. They should monitor and block malicious activity. If UPS knew that they were delivering packages laced with anthrax you would expect them to do something about it.
ISP’s can use some great monitoring tools from Arbor, Mazu, Q1Labs to detect this stuff.
To date these extortion attempts have targeted on-line gaming sites and the credit card processing services that support them. Other likely targets in the short term are foreign exchange sites, banks, insurance companies, stock trading sites, and e-commerce sites.
If you are part of such an online business start barring the doors and lowering the portculli now!
Richard Stiennon is an industry consultant. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
