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Living with threats

1st August 2010 Back in 2004, Bill Gates predicted that spam would be a thing of the past within two years. As we all know now, and quite a lot of people predicted at the time, far from being a solved problem, the volume of spam has continued to increase. Read More

Web application security goes from bad to worse in many sectors

27th July 2010 NTA Monitor's 2010 Annual Web Application Security Report analysed the data gathered from web application security tests performed for a wide range of industry sectors over a 12-month period... Read More

IT Managers get to grips with Internet security issues

4th May 2010 According to NTA Monitor's 2010 Annual Security Report, the average number of Internet security vulnerabilities afflicting organisations has fallen.. Read More

Responsible Patching

1st January 2010 Microsoft's response to the "zero day" exploit that was used in the cyber attacks against Google shows that software vendors still have a lot to learn when it comes to responding to vulnerabilities. Read More
Date: 5th February 2000
Risk: High

In recent articles we addressed the 'distributed attack networks' such as TFN and Trinoo that allow widespread co-ordinated attacks. Now Yahoo have admitted that their systems were taken out of service for several hours under such an attack.

Yahoo run one of the most hardened of the major high-volume web sites, with an up-time of over 99.3 percent, a tribute to their security and also their resilience and reliability infrastructure, so it is a sign of the power of the new attacks. The attack was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, no breach was made into Yahoo's systems, but nevertheless Yahoo is reported to have lost several hundred thousand dollars in 'page hits' advertising revenue due to the outages.

References

NY Times article USA Today article NTA Monitor white paper on the DDoS problems