Many organisations are struggling to keep pace with the
changing face of security threats, according to a poll conducted by F5 Networks
at Infosecurity Europe 2013 in London.
Only 10% of security professionals polled said they could
describe accurately how DNS reflection attacks work, just weeks after a spat
between web hosting company Cyberbunker and anti-spam website Spamhaus led to
some of the biggest distributed denial-of-service(DDoS) attacks to date.
DNS reflection or amplification is a type of distributed
denial of service (DDoS) attack that takes advantage of the fact that a small
DNS query can generate a much larger response.
When combined with source address spoofing, an attacker
can direct a large volume of network traffic to a target system by initiating
relatively small DNS queries.
The poll found
that only 11% would be completely confident that the day-to-day operations of
their business would not be disrupted, should they be hit by such an attack.
Many respondents reported feeling vulnerable due to the
host of modern threats from cyber criminals, hacktivists and hackers.
Some 87% claimed that it is more difficult than ever to
secure their business from the threat of cyber attacks, with almost one in four
citing the BYOD trend as the major factor.
Others referenced the increasing complexity of threats
(20%) and the change to espionage and political motives (14%) as the number one
factor in increasing the difficulty in protecting businesses.
The poll revealed other concerns around protecting
infrastructure and applications, with 83% of respondents saying they were less
than fully confident that their organisation has consistent security and
availability policies across their entire IT infrastructure.
“Both the scale and the method of the Spamhaus attacks
should have acted as a wake-up call, but the research suggests that many
security professionals would still struggle to deal effectively with the new
breed of DDoS attacks, and fear the potential impact on their organisation,”
said Joakim Sundberg, security solution architect at F5.Some 85% acknowledged
the risk of wiping personal as well as company data when safeguarding a
corporate mobile device following a theft.
“As organisations continue to move their applications to
the cloud as a way to increase infrastructure agility and reduce costs, it is
vital that they close off any back doors to would-be attackers,” he said.
According to Sundberg, conventional firewalls are failing
in the face of increasingly complex internet threats.
More intelligence has to be built into the corporate
network to ensure their security can handle the newest threats, he said.
“This includes being able to configure and automate security
seamlessly to ensure the entire IT environment is protected, regardless of the
mix of on-premise, cloud or hybrid infrastructures,”
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