![]() Federal investment could help create and secure a more robust infrastructure. This is the number one area of focus that the government should have."Īs for the backbone providers, Brady said that because of the dire financial condition of most companies that manage the Internet backbone, there is little private money available to ensure the extra capacity should one or more parts of the backbone be attacked. "If you run a DNS server, what is your monetary incentive to secure it? There is none. ![]() ![]() "This showcases a specific vulnerability that requires the government to get involved," Julian said. That could include tax incentives or direct federal funding for private companies and public organizations managing key DNS servers to secure their systems, all of which are currently operated as a free service by companies, government entities and non-profit organizations. More federal management of key components of the Internet infrastructure is needed, Julian and Brady agreed. "When one backbone goes down, the traffic has to go somewhere," said Brady, recalling that the recent outage on the UUNet Internet backbone operated by WorldCom was felt instantly worldwide. That infrastructure of roadways over which Internet traffic passes is more "brittle" than the flexible architecture of DNS, Brady said. Instead of sending a flood of packets all using the same protocol, attackers might disguise a DDoS attack as normal traffic - what Julian referred to as a "bandwidth anomaly." In such an attack, nothing about the protocols used or packets sent would appear unusual, but the volume of traffic would be enough to overwhelm the targeted server.Įven more pernicious, Brady and Julian agreed, would be attacks that target the routing infrastructure, as opposed to the DNS infrastructure of the Internet. They're random and non-directed," Brady said.įortunately, Monday's attacks were not sophisticated, relying on a simple "packet flood" approach in which information packets are sent in high volumes to a server, and using a protocol - ICMP - that is typically not seen in very high volumes, Brady and Julian said.įuture attacks could be much more sophisticated, they said. These attacks are not professional or financial in nature. "The big drivers we're seeing (in DDoS attacks) are juvenile rivalries - revenge for incidents that might have happened during online gaming. While the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Infrastructure Protection Center is investigating the attacks, Brady pointed out that some of the most frequent sources of such attacks are teenagers, not terrorists. The IP addresses and access passwords for those systems are traded on the Internet like you or I used to trade baseball cards," Brady said. "With automated attack tools, even inexperienced people can get control of a large number of hosts. Gerry Brady, chief technology officer for Guardent said that sophisticated software programs make leveraging those compromised machines a simple matter, even for novice attackers.
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