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How Microsoft Fights Off 100,000 Attacks A Month
El Lobo writes to mention a ComputerWorld article about Microsoft's battles with the Hackers of the world. The software giant fights off more than 100,000 attacks every month, protecting their data-heavy internal network from the paws of your average script kiddie. The article discusses Microsoft's 'defense in depth' strategy, and discusses just some of the layers in that barrier. From the article: "The first layer of protection for the Microsoft VPN is two-factor authentication. After an infamous incident in the fall of 2000, Microsoft installed a certificate-based Public Key Infrastructure and rolled out smart cards to all employees and contractors with remote access to the network and individuals with elevated access accounts such as domain administrators. Two-factor authentication requires that you have something physical, in this case the smart card, and also know something, in this case a password."
reminds me of the story from a long while back about a site touting the greatness of Windows Server Software (might have actually have been a Microsoft site) -- well, somebody gets an error message one day, and it turns out the site was running Apache on Unix.
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Honestly, my own computers fight off thousands of "attacks" a month, if you lower the bar enough. Are there worms knocking on port 137? Or are these actual hackers with stolen passwords/passcards?
Actually, they do...to a point:
i crosoftcom_runs_linux_up_to_a_point_.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/17/wwwm
(old article and I wasn't able to duplicate their test so it may have changed)
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huh, I almost always use ping www.yahoo.com when I'm testing a DNS.
does everyone default to this for some reason that I'm not aware of? Is that what you're referring to?
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I thought that those sites were actually Apple "enthusiast" sites, and they were running on Linux? This site confirms it; the article was in 2004, though, and those sites might be on Apple servers now.
This is hilarious! I always ping yahoo.com when DNS testing too! I choose it because they have a reliable service and consistent response times.... and I never Yahoo! and I would not want to do this to a service/site I like/use :)
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Actually I don't know how they count their attacks, but just attach a host to the network for a while and observe and you'll see automated attacks nonstop.
On my LAN gateway I have had a continuous stream of background SSH and misc Windows services attacks for years plus the occasional attempt at something more creative. Taking each of these into account I could probably arrive at thousands, if not tens of thousands per month.
I don't know how many machines MS has online but since the article doesn't really say what counts as an attack, the number seems to be ridiculously small.
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I've wondered about this update server before... does WinXP actually validate the stuff it downloads before installing it? Even if the update server is hard to compromise, some malware writer could have their malware auto-update by editing the hosts file.
Indeed!
A few days ago I used Netcraft to take a look at what Microsoft was using for its severs.
There were 355 servers listed. A few are "unknow", a few more are "Solaris" and some I don't recognize, but at least 1/3rd of them are Linux.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!