By Sharla Sikes

Distributed denial-of-service attacks have been regarded as the top threat to ISPs. Now botnets have passed them to claim the top spot.

Arbor Networks reports that the gap between amateur attacks and coordinated attacks from thousands of bot hosts has widened. Arbor also found in a recent study that most ISPs can not currently detect threats against VoIP.

“One thing we know about cyber criminals is that they adapt and look for weaknesses,” said Danny McPherson, Arbor Networks chief research officer in a statement. “When it comes to network security, complacency should never be part of the equation.”

This is the third annual report from Arbor, a company that designs security and performance products for networks.

DDoS attacks are a major problem for security, as well. New attacks come in the form of multi-gigabit “professional” efforts to compromise victims’ hard drives with “zombie” botnets eating bandwidth and distributing spam.

With the growing sophistication level of attacks, some ISPs have found the silver lining in providing detection and mitigation of attacks into a source of profit; more and more are doing so or have plans to in the future.

Despite the positive movement toward reducing attacks, VoIP remains vulnerable.

“Given that over half of the surveyed ISPs believe that they can effectively mitigate most internet attacks against their backbone infrastructure and customers, many ISPs now believe they are ahead of the curve,” said Danny McPherson, Arbor Networks chief research officer. “But all of this ISP optimism about infrastructure security should be tempered by the survey data on emerging critical infrastructure. Over half of surveyed providers said they had no means to either detect or mitigate attacks against DNS, and close to 90 per cent have no means to protect critical VoIP infrastructure.”

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