Batten Down The Hatches: Anonymous – Coming Soon to Your Network

As security professionals facing the rising tide of threats, many of us find ourselves researching and implementing next-generation perimeter defenses to mitigate risks.  Through analysis of threat vs. protection we quickly realize that no single protection will suffice; current risks require multiple protection layers to secure the business.

Typical intrusion prevention services (IPS) and next generation firewall (NGFW) devices claim coverage, but beware – they fall short.  In fact recent studies from Radware’s 2011 Global Application & Network Security Report show combined IPS and FW account for 32% of the common DDoS bottleneck.

From Zero to Fully Provisioned Application in Minutes – Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I published an article in which we discussed how we can shorten the time it takes to roll out a new application.

We outlined the following steps of an application rollout:

1. Purchase servers and allocate storage
2. Purchase Application Delivery Controller (ADC)

Operation Blackout – Get Yourself Prepared

Operation Blackout due date is approaching: Anonymous is planning to shutdown the Internet on March 31st, 2012 by attacking all 13 DNS root servers.

DNS is a critical infrastructure of the Internet as every web transaction involves a DNS service that is provided by the internet service provider. A successful attack against DNS servers will result in halt of all Internet based services.

DDoS Yourself First – Part II: Rise of the Availability Vulnerabilities

Availability problems aren’t necessarily unique; however the testing is certainly different, as I discussed in Part 1 of DDoS Yourself.

This “availability security problem” is resulting in an increased risk to enterprise’s whose business models are tied to time (government elections, financial trading, online promotional retailers, insurance reconciliations, etc.).

As a result, many organizations are asking themselves if they have adequate visibility to the vulnerabilities they have to hacktivist (ideologically motivated) and Availability-based (competitive motivated) DDoS attacks?

Darkness (Optima) – DDoS for Hire

A clear trend in the security scene these days is the change in attacker profile. Computer hacking and DDoS attacks are no longer reserved for the small group of individuals who are familiar with the “bits and bytes” of underlying technologies. Today’s attackers may very well be ordinary computer users.

This is a result of an abundance of tools out there which do not require technical abilities surpassing the normal usage of a program, or simply the supplying of a credit card. A recent example is the Anonymous-OS which has been recently released. This is an Ubuntu- based OS which is pre-installed with all the necessary, and easy to use tools for the novice Anonymous member.