Worldwide cyberattacks increasing at an alarming rate, IPC warns

Cyber attacks increased at an alarming rate in the first quarter of 2014, a security vendor disclosed this week.

 

IP Converge Data Services Inc. said the rapid evolution of distributed denial-of-service techniques threaten to make large-scale attacks easier and faster.

 

DDoS attacks flood a target site's server with bogus requests, often from multiple locations and networks, slowing down the site or knocking it offline.

 

The firm, citing the Quarterly Global DDoS Attack Report of US-based Prolexic Technologies for the first quarter, noted:

 

 

"This spike represents a looming threat, which is an increasing availability of new DDoS practices that ultimately make attacks much easier to deploy, allowing even less skillful hackers to launch an attack," said Niño Valmonte, director of product management and marketing at IPC.

 

Toolkits

 

IP Converge Data Services said DDoS attackers have started using crimeware toolkits to get past a portal or e-commerce website’s securities.

 

“For today’s black hat hackers, reflection and amplification have made it easier for them to launch attacks, as they no longer need to build large bot armies,” said Valmonte.

 

With anti-virus software and firewalls incapable of preventing DDoS attacks, some enterprises have installed premise-based anti-DDoS hardware equipment.

 

But these incur huge costs and require a special manpower skill set to operate.

 

Also, the bandwidth capacity to handle the onslaught of larger DDoS attacks is more than what a company would require for its legitimate web traffic.

 

Other enterprises look to their telcos and Internet Service Providers for DDoS mitigation.

 

But there is another solution DDoS mitigation service providers who have the infrastructure to sustain protection services.

 

"They utilize massive network bandwidth capacity and equipment at multiple sites, called scrubbing centers, around the world that can take in large-scale attack traffic. By subscribing to the service, the provider 'scrubs' the Internet traffic headed for a customer’s IP address and allows only clean or legitimate traffic to continue to the destination," it said. — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News