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Conficker alerts doubles on first day of April |
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Interoute
: 01 April, 2009 |
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Interoute detects increased activity of Conficker worm but doesn't believe that a large scale DDoS attack is imminent |
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Mark Osborne, Director of Information Security at Interoute, owner operator of Europe's largest next-generation network, comments on the increased 1st April Confickr activity:
'Confickr activity is more prevalent today, with much of the activity taking place in Frankfurt, London and Milan. The overall number of alerts per hour has more than doubled as of 9am GMT April 1st, according to our security controls embedded in key cities in our pan-European network. However, it is not currently being used to launch an attack on a specific target.
"We are not expecting the owners of the Confickr Botnet to fire off a large scale DDoS attack as this would cause them to lose their asset. If any attack is launched, the participating machines can be detected and cleaned, leaving the owners with no asset. Having said that, the owners may want to show off a little bit and prove that they do own the asset, so we are keeping an eye out for a Gesture DDoS Attack.
"Businesses or government organisations worried about DDoS attacks need to consider if they are in a position to withstand such a force. Protection against a DDoS attack needs to be built into the core of a network. And, the unfortunate fact is that for some time now legacy networks have crumbled under modest attacks. Organisations need to put their best foot forward and look at next generation networks with built in DDoS defence capabilities. Such powerful attacks can only be defended by a substantial resource dedicated to fending off the threat embedded in the core of a substantial network, so that latency and bandwidth is not impacted."
"The absence of a 'Gesture Attack' will no doubt mean that the Botnet will be used for SPAM and general Trojan activity (ie sniffing for passwords and credit cards) which is bad news for over-strained email inboxes - a massive increase in this activity may well test in-house solutions which are often size constrained."
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