Staying Ahead of the Hacktivist Curve
Recent years have seen an increase in the availability of botnets for hire and inexpensive, easy-to-use hacking tools. This development has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of hacktivism and hacker collectives such as Anonymous and LulzSec. In fact, research shows that political or ideological beliefs are now the most common motivating factor behind DDoS attacks1 – a sea change from previous years in which financial gain was the leading DDoS driver. As headlines from around the world have demonstrated, government organizations are now primary targets of cybercrime, and the variety and sophistication of the network threats they’re encountering are greater than ever.
In the past, DDoS typically referred to flooding attacks that compromised network availability by saturating bandwidth and infrastructure. Today’s DDoS threats are much more complex. They often combine flooding and application-layer attacks to impact network availability at the macro and micro levels, targeting both network bandwidth and specific Web applications and services such as email. In addition to disrupting critical government operations, this type of blended attack can open the door to malware and advanced threats that lead directly to the theft of sensitive government information.
Another source of potential risk for government networks is insider threats. These threats originate from employees or other authorized users on the network who seek to access unauthorized information for personal gain or retribution.
Last but not least, compliance requirements from regulatory groups such as NIST and CSRIC continue to grow alongside the threat landscape. While these requirements provide valuable network security benchmarks, they also increase the responsibilities of government network operators, whose budgets and staff are already stretched thin.
Born out of a DARPA research project, Arbor Networks has been a trusted network security advisor to government organizations around the world for more than a decade. We’ve consulted with federal CERTs, branches of the U.S. military and intergovernmental groups. When the European Union was investigating the threat presented by large-scale cyber attacks, it called upon two companies for expert analysis and insight: Symantec, the world’s largest security company, and Arbor Networks.
Our wide-ranging government experience and sustained leadership in the network security market uniquely position us to help your government organization overcome its network challenges. Our comprehensive solutions provide the internal network visibility, actionable intelligence and mitigation capabilities your organization needs to detect and block DDoS, insider and other malicious threats; meet evolving compliance requirements; and stay ahead of the hacktivist curve.
1 "2011 Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report,” Arbor Networks
