Register.com a victim of DDOS attack

The Washington Post's Brian Krebs reports that web host and domain name registrar Register.com was the victim of a "target of a sustained attack this week, disrupting service for thousands of customers." The attack was a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, launched by a botnet of hundreds or thousands of compromised PCs, which caused a 3-hour outage for Register.com last week. It appears that Register.com has taken steps to resolve the problem, but in the process, they unfortunately lost some business from their customers. Web hosts and registrars like Register.com are often a target of hackers that seek to achieve economies of scale in their attacks. It is very important that web hosting providers, an important group in the Internet infrastructure ecosystem, maintain high security standards to protect themselves and their customers.

Cybercrime more lucrative than the global drug business

AT&T's Chief Security Officer, Ed Amoroso, testified to Congress recently about the size and scope of global cybercriminal activity. In his testimony, he says, "Last year the FBI announced that revenues from cyber-crime, for the first time ever, exceeded drug trafficking as the most lucrative illegal global business, estimated at reaping more than $1 trillion annually in illicit profits."

The primary activity he warns Congress about is the threat of cyber-warfare. An example of this is where criminals or terrorists seize control of a large number of PCs via a botnet, and use those nodes to launch a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against US interests. He cites the example of Estonia, where 2 years ago a large-scale cyber attack produced catastrophic results: "The entire country was disconnected from the Internet."

Certainly, DDOS attacks, botnets and cyber-warfare are among the most dangerous cyber-security threats to the US and to the Internet as a whole. What is even more alarming is the massive scale and scope of cybercriminal activity as a whole: $1 trillion, larger than even the global drug trade. It will take significant effort and coordination between governments and the private sector to address these threats. We at Dasient have already joined this effort. Look for future announcements from us about how we are addressing the growing threat of cybercrime.