When Servers Attack Your Bank: The Rise of Server Botnets

Imagine the following scenario: You’re a hosting company and you receive a call from one of the largest banks in the United States informing you that they are currently experiencing a cyber attack. Why are they calling you? The attack is coming from your servers.

eCrime Congress in Germany: Restoring the Equilibrium of Attackers Vs. Defenders

Last week, I attended eCrime Congress in Frankfurt, Germany. Held on January 30,Radware was one of the sponsors of the event, which featured a lecture track that ran throughout the day and included breaks for the sponsors’ pavilion.

Shooting From Behind the Fence

Can You Stay Anonymous While Participating in a DDoS Attack?
Taking part in a Hacktivist group is completely different than being part of a Botnet. In a Botnet, case participants are unknowingly “recruited” to an attack. In the Hacktivist group, case members take part in attack activities on their own accord.
Just this past month, Anonymous hackers in London were jailed for a series of DDoS attacks on PayPal and other payment services such as Visa and MasterCard.

Proudly Announcing: Radware Acquires Strangeloop Networks!

Today is an important day for both Radware and our network of valued customers and channel partners as we announce the acquisition of Strangeloop Networks. Strangeloop is a leader in the Web Performance Optimization (WPO) domain, offering best-in-class, field-proven technology for accelerating Web application response time. Before I dive into why this is such a milestone, I want to address why Web performance optimization is so critical, and as a result, why this acquisition is so important.

Security Posture Drift: Thinking Old School

Charles Kolodgy is a Research Vice President for IDC’s Security Products service and is a featured guest blogger.

Security can’t be set and forgotten because the conditions are in flux.  Products are updated and threats evolve as attackers find new ways to exploit technology or to bypass existing security.  Examples of new attack methods have been identified in Radware’s 2012 Global Application and Network Security Report.  Attackers are utilizing Server-based botnets more than ever and the sophistication and severity of attacks in general increased significantly in 2012. Server-based botnets give attackers a much bigger bang for the buck.  A DDoS attack using servers instead of client-based bots is like hitting someone with a 50 pound bag at once instead of pelting someone with hundreds of bean bags.  Regarding sophistication, using Radware’s APT score, the number of attacks scoring 7 or higher (out of 10) increased 150% (58% in 2012 compared to 23% in 2011).

New Attack Trends – Are You Bringing a Knife to the Gunfight?

Today, we launched our 2012 Global Application and Network Security report. It was prepared by our security experts – the Emergency Response Team (ERT) – who’ve seen their fair share of cyber attacks while actively monitoring and mitigating attacks in real-time. In this year’s annual report, our experts have uncovered several new trends in cyber-security worthy of a closer look.

Application Delivery in the Age of SDN

Jim Frey is a Managing Director, Network Management for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and is a featured guest blogger.

As the dust begins to settle from the hype storms around Software Defined Networking (SDN), one result is clear – we will never look at IT infrastructure, and networking in particular, in quite the same way again.  And while much of the sniping and scrapping has been aimed at those seeking to commoditize the lowest layers of the network thus far, the long range objective of SDN is to bind network function more directly to the needs of the application layer in a secure, policy-oriented manner.  While the essential enabling technologies have been proven out in a few high profile large-scale deployments, mainstream adoption will be gated by the maturity at the touch points between network consumers (a.k.a. applications and services) and the new network control architecture.

US Bank Attacks in Review – It’s a Brave New World

An article published in the New York Times last Wednesday touched off a media frenzy by suggesting that Iran has been behind the cyber attacks on US financial institutions taking place since late September of last year. While the questions of forensics and culpability pose a particular challenge when it comes to cyber security, there are a number of unprecedented components to these attacks that should absolutely command our attention.