Inauguration will spike traffic, threats
Posted on | January 16, 2009 | 1 comment
Next Tuesday, something else besides spam, phishing scams and denial of services attacks will congest the Internet. Experts are predicting a tsunami of Web traffic generated by the historic presidential inauguration of Barack Obama.
Paul Judge, CTO, Purewire, bets that Internet traffic will at least double; Mark Parker, from Marshal8e6 TRACE, thinks it will triple.
Judge predicts Obama-related traffic will spike on news sites, YouTube and Twitter, with excited folks providing real-time commentary. The search engines will also be slammed with people searching for stories.
Judge
“Businesses can expect a huge drain on employee productivity,” says Judge. “Let’s consider a company with 10,000 employees with Web access. At $30 an hour with about one-third of them spending at least one hour online Tuesday, that’s $100,000 in lost productivity costs. Significant, considering our tough economic climate.”
Parker agrees. He says legions of office workers will stream web casts of the inauguration sitting at their cubicles. “When that happens, the result will be a loss of productivity in the workplace and a greater increase in phishing and malicious attacks,” says Parker.
Parker
Security administrators should be on the lookout for a large amount of phishing and malicious emails that target users with subject lines like “watch the inauguration here” or “join our forum to watch the inauguration live,” he says.
Network administrators managing systems already running near bandwidth caps should be forewarned about having to pay the high rates that can come with “burstable” Internet feeds. “You may want to make plans to provide central locations in the office where the inauguration can be watched,” says Parker.
And workers, it might not be a bad idea to ask your supervisor if he or she has any objections to your use of company equipment and systems to watch the inauguration, says Parker. And, please, please, please use only sources and services you know well and trust.
–Byron Acohido
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As a follow-up. Marshal8e6 TRACE Labs identified the first malicious emails centered around the inauguration over the weekend.
Emails are sent with subjects such as Amazing News with text stating that Obama has refused to accept the Presidency. Links in the email take the user to a site which will attempt to install malicious software on the users system.
User’s should be alert when receiving emails from unknown sources. Domains used for this blended email+web attack include greatobama, superobama and other similar variants.
Comment by Mark Parker — 1/19/2009 @ 12:11 pm