Internet Hacker Attacks at an All-Time High

Online networks suffered their heaviest attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault

By Nick Heath

Online networks suffered their heaviest brute force attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault.

IP networks were bombarded by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks—attempts to make networks unreachable by flooding them with traffic—as intense as 40Gbps, a survey of 70 IP network operators worldwide has claimed.

The report by Arbor Networks says that the largest sustained attacks in the last two years were 24 Gbps and 17 Gbps, a 67 per cent increase in attack scale over last

A total of 36 per cent of respondents suffered sustained attacks larger than 1Gbps last year and the number suffering attacks of this type doubled in 2008.

Botnets continue to be the main vehicle used to disrupt network operations—accounting for 26 per cent of attacks—followed by DNS cache poisoning.

Chief security officer for Arbor Networks Danny McPherson said the growth in attack size continues to "significantly outpace" the corresponding increase in underlying transmission speed and infrastructure investment.

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