40-Gbps DDoS Attacks Worry Even Tier-1 ISPs

sturgeon and other readers let us know that Arbor Networks has released their annual survey of tier-1 / tier-2 ISP security engineers. This year they got responses from 70 lead engineers. While DDoS attacks are reaching new heights of backbone-crushing traffic — 40 Gbps was seen this past year — the insiders are also worried about emerging threats to DNS and BGP. The summary notes that "Most believe that the DNS cache poisoning flaw disclosed earlier this year was poorly handled and increased the danger of the threat," but doesn't spell out what a better way of handling it might have been. All in all, the ISPs sound a bit pessimistic — one says "fewer resources, less management support, and increased workload." You can request the full PDF report here, but it will cost you contact information. In related news, an anonymous reader passes along a survey by Secure Computing of 199 international security experts and other "industry insiders" from utilities, oil and gas, financial services, government, telecommunications, transportation and other critical infrastructure industries. They are worried too.

Comments

Re:let it collapse

[Red Flayer]

Alan Greenspan's reaction was priceless saying that he'd expected banks to take reasonable risks and not commit suicide. It was in their own interests to self-regulate but surprise surprise, greed won out.

Just to be clear...

First, Greenspan expected banks to make choices in their own self-interest... but instead bank executives made decisions that were in their own self interests. He forgot that corporations are not actual decision-makers, individuals are, and individuals tend to make the choices that are best for them, not the choices that are best for their company.

Second, given the expectation of government bailout, it was no longer in the banks' self-interest to self-regulate, since they got to externalize the risk of bad investments. It's been known for years among financial circles that any bank failures big enough to potentially unhinge the economy would be prevented by government bailout. This information influenced lending decisions.

The simple fact of the matter is that top-level decision-makers at these financial institutions made decisions to maximize their bonuses, and those of their friends. Since the bonuses were not tied to long-term health of the company, the choices made were not optimized for long-term health of the company (or the economy as a whole). Any guilt over the negative repercussions was assuaged by the knowledge that the taxpayer would step in and bail them out.

Really, it was an investor's dream -- privatize the profits, socialize the risks.