Networking

A week-long DDoS attack that launched a flood of traffic at an Asian e-commerce company in early November was the biggest such incident so far this year, according to Prolexic, a company that defends websites against such attacks.

The distributed denial-of-service attack consisted of four consecutive waves launched from multiple botnets between Nov. 5 and Nov. 12, 2011, Prolexic said. It estimated that up to 250,000 computers infected with malware participated in the attack, many of them in China.

Internet globeA zero-day vulnerability is causing BIND 9 DNS servers to crash across the internet. The flaw, described as an "as-yet unidentified network event", appears to be a denial of service vulnerability being exploited in-the-wild. The flaw affects all supported versions of BIND.

The internet Systems Consortium (ISC) have described the problem as follows:

For the past 15 years or so, security pros have relied on the trusty firewall and other hardware to keep bad guys from running amok on corporate networks. For the most part, this has meant blocking tainted e-mails and keeping workers away from harmful websites.

The latest wave of Web services, like Skype and Google Docs, has introduced fresh problems. They can transfer files, store data and allow remote computer access in ways that can't be easily patrolled by the standard sentinels.

With malicious perpetrators increasingly devising sophisticated, complex attacks against critical systems controlling critical infrastructure, such as power plants and financial institutions, the time has come to consider a new secure alternative Internet, according to a top government official.

As Internet traffic volumes increase at exponential rates (by 2013 it's predicted that there will be 56 exabytes crossing the internet per month) the data centers that house and secure applications and data need to scale while remaining highly secure.

Cisco introduced additions to its data center networking portfolio that address these needs and deliver architectural flexibility and scale for physical, virtual or cloud computing environments.

As long-term evolution (LTE) networks, such as Telstra's new 4G network, bring about super fast mobile broadband to consumers across the globe, they could also potentially open up smartphones, tablets and other devices to hacks that previously only concerned PC users, according to network vendor Alcatel-Lucent. Unlike existing networks, which are partially IP-based, LTE networks are all-IP networks.

This month, Verizon will be making good on its threat to choke data speeds for the most active 5 percent of its 3G data customers.

If you use 2GB of data or more each month and have a 3G unlimited plan, there's a good chance this slow-down applies to you.

Two New Zealand ISPs have reported falling traffic after that nation's controversial new "three strikes" copyright enforcement legislation went into effect at the start of the month. Kiwi Internet users may have been spooked by the threat of fines as high as NZ$15,000.

A group of DNS providers and content delivery network (CDN) companies have devised a new extension to the DNS protocol that that aims to more effectively direct users to the closest CDN endpoint. Google, OpenDNS, BitGravity, EdgeCast, and CDNetworks are among the companies participating in the initiative, which they are calling The Global Internet Speedup.

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.