The Last Watchdog

on Internet security by Byron Acohido

An ugly story: corporate nets under heavy attack

Posted on | April 9, 2008 | add a comment

 

More from the floor at RSA:

AT&T Security Services vice president Stan Quintana and I had a stimulating breakfast chat about the need to, as Quintana puts it, “remediate Internet attacks in the cloud, before they can reach private networks.”

ATT is using a technology, called Daytona, to do real time data streaming analysis to screen out malicious traffic in its IP trunk lines. He says Daytona allows AT&T to see distributed denial of service attacks in the early formation stage. He says dDos extortion artists (see link) aren’t just targeting gambling sites.

Finanicial institutions and any corporation that derives revenue from its web presence are being increasingly targeted for extortionists dDos attacks. “It’s an ugly story we’re seeing every day,” says Quintana. “It really spans the gamut of companies. And it’s getting worse.”

Qunitana says more “predictive knowledge mining” of IP traffic has to be done at all levels.

Cisco Security chief Scott Weiss told me Cisco wants to help companies do just that. Cisco is taking the packet analyzer tool it acquired in the acquisition of email security firm IronPort and pushing out to Cisco enterprise firewalls. In early trials, Weiss told me as much as 60% of workstations and laptops checked in corporations turn up botted and/or riddled with keystroke loggers or banking Trojans. “If we can get the instrumentation into the firewall and make it a little more intelligent, we can show how many PCs have been compromised,” says Weiss.

Secure Computing intelligence director Dmitri Alperovitch, agrees: “If you can remove the malicious traffic, that will alleviate much of the problem.”

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