Although the number and intensity of distributed denial-of-service attacks are on the rise, users are hard-pressed to find tangible new services to help thwart or defend against such assaults.. . .
Although the number and intensity of distributed denial-of-service attacks are on the rise, users are hard-pressed to find tangible new services to help thwart or defend against such assaults.

However, the largest ISPs are doing more behind the scenes and are promising new tools by next year that will help predict and better defend against worms and viruses that act like distributed DoS attacks and true distributed DoS strikes.

"There have been more attacks in the last six months than there have been in the last 10 years," said Hossein Eslambolchi, president of AT&T Labs, at a recent press conference.

Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center for reporting Internet security problems backs up such claims. Through the end of September, there were 114,855 security breaches reported by users and ISPs, which is 32,761 more than all of 2002. These reports include all types of security policy violations from distributed DoS to hacker attack.

Although there are more security violations, the types of distributed DoS attacks have not changed much in 12 to 18 months, says Paul Morville, director of product management at Arbor Networks Inc., which offers PeakFlow network behavior anomaly detection products to service providers. What has changed is the size and scope of these attacks.

The link for this article located at ComputerWorld is no longer available.