Scariest IPv6 attack scenarios
Experts are reporting a rise in the number of attacks that take advantage of known vulnerabilities of IPv6, a next-generation addressing scheme that is being adopted across the Internet. IPv6 replaces the Internet's main communications protocol, which is known as IPv4.
Salient Federal Solutions, a Fairfax, Va., IT engineering firm, is reporting real-world incidents of IPv6 attacks based on the emerging protocol's tunneling capabilities, routing headers, DNS broadcasting and rogue routing announcements. The company asserts that all of these threats can be eliminated with the use of IPv6-enabled deep packet inspection tools, which it and other network vendors sell.
"We definitely see these attacks, we just can't say where we are seeing them," says Lisa Donnan, who leads Salient's Cyber Security Center of Excellence. Salient Federal Solutions purchased IPv6 consulting and training firm Command Information in March. The No. 1 attack that Salient Federal is seeing is the result of so much IPv6 traffic being tunneled across IPv4 networks, particularly using the Teredo mechanism that is built into both Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7. This vulnerability with IPv6-over-IPv4 tunneling has been known for at least five years, but it is still being exploited.
