Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 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.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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!