What Internet Service Providers Fear

Every night, before they go to bed, ISPs check their closet for botnets. That's a funny way of putting it, but the issue is serious. Botnets have finally surpassed distributed denial of service attacks as the top threat identified by service providers. And I'm not just saying this, these facts are shown in a study by Arbor Networks which has a long-standing customer relationship with more than 70% of the global service provider community.

And just think about it - have you read the recent news about Storm? It's a millions-of-machines-botnet that has more computing power than BlueGene. Now, that's why botnets are really an issue.

The fact that ISPs fear botnets now has been found out by the Arbor researchers after a survey. They did such studies before, but botnets never had so much importance. And anyway, DDOS are coming in second. But botnets are far more dangerous, because they can attack other machines or sites, even with DDOS. So, zombie computers are now the thing to fear, rather than the distributed denial of service attacks.

"Given that over half of the surveyed ISPs believe that they can effectively mitigate most Internet attacks against their backbone infrastructure and customers, many ISPs now believe they are ahead of the curve," said Danny McPherson, Arbor Networks chief research officer. "But all of this ISP optimism about infrastructure security should be tempered by the survey data on emerging critical infrastructure. Over half of surveyed providers said they had no means to either detect or mitigate attacks against DNS, and close to 90 percent have no means to protect critical VoIP infrastructure. One thing we know about cyber criminals is that they adapt and look for weaknesses. When it comes to network security, complacency should never be part of the equation."