NTA Monitor

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Will IE6 be the next NT4?

1st October 2009 All penetration testers will remember the long tail of Windows NT 4.0, and how this operating system continued to be used long past the point when security updates stopped at the end of 2004. For many years the presence of an unpatchable NT4 server was a common issue in a penetration test report, and it is only now, almost five years after security support ended, that finding an NT4 system on a network is becoming a rare event. Read More

One in four web applications susceptible to high risk security flaws

7th September 2009 NTA Monitor has reported a 10% increase in the total number of web applications found to have at least one high-risk security issue... Read More

Organisations facing a changing threat landscape

20th July 2009 According to NTA Monitor's 2009 Annual Security Report, the average number of Internet security vulnerabilities is on the rise... Read More

The Return of the Insider Threat

1st July 2009 When NTA started security testing twelve years ago, the main focus was on the insider threat. There were many reports with statistics showing that most security breaches were due to insiders. By contrast there was very little focus on the external threat via Internet and third-party network links. Back then many companies did not even have a firewall. 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