Tag Archive for: Relying

The pitfalls of relying only on your ISP for DDoS protection

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Relying on your Internet Service Provider (ISP) for DDoS protection is like going to a restaurant known for the freshest, tastiest seafood and ordering beef. Sure, they have it on the menu and they are happy to sell it to you, but the experience is not likely to compare well to what you’d have in a fine steak house.

To be sure, ISPs have good reason to provide their users with DDoS protection services. ISPs with a better track record of mitigating DDoS attacks enjoy a better reputation for security, which improves sales and allows them to charge more. They can then use their increased earnings to invest in better DDoS solutions. The cycle reinforces itself.

This is a simplified version of how things should go. Reality is often vastly different. ISPs are rarely able to provide best-in-class security to their users. As I said, while DDoS protection is an important value-add for ISP providers, cybersecurity is not their core expertise. This leads to understandable compromises that impact the quality of the security they can offer.

The 2021 DDoS Threat Landscape Report shows attacks are constantly evolving in size, volume, frequency, and complexity. What doesn’t change is the attackers’ focus: the infrastructure their targets depend on most. That could be customer-facing applications, cloud services, network infrastructure, or an ISP itself. As organizations continue to pursue digital transformation, the technologies that drive this – cloud services, mobile networks, and IoT devices – are becoming targets for DDoS attacks. New vectors are being weaponized all the time, and ISPs are finding it difficult to stay on top of an ever-changing threat landscape.

In this post, we’ll examine the growing complexity and volume of the DDoS landscape, and explain why organizations should think critically about augmenting the DDoS protection provided by their ISP with technology that secures all assets at the edge and ensures uninterrupted business operations.

All DDoS attacks are not created equal

What if every cyberattacker in the world shared a single DDoS attack strategy and never changed their plan? In this scenario, it would be easy to provide a single DDoS mitigation solution…

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Russian Intelligence Agencies Relying on ‘Bruce Force’ to Hack America

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Recently, the U.S. and British intelligence communities issued an advisory uncovering the “Brute Force” cyber techniques used by the Russian GRU intelligence agency against hundreds of Western government and private targets. These revelations come in the wake of months of successive cyberattacks against American and European targets, including the SolarWinds, which saw Russian and Chinese hackers gain access to U.S. government systems, and Colonial Pipeline, which interfered with the flow of fuel on America’s East Coast this past May.

According to the Intelligence Community, the GRU cyberattacks started from the middle of 2019 and are likely still ongoing, with the GRU’s 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS) unit 26165 identified as the main perpetrator behind the attacks. The goal of this cyber warfare campaign is to access protected and classified databases in order to purloin information, but also to pave the way for future breaches.  

The advisory is a joint product of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency. 

Related: America needs new covert options for Great Power Competition

KGB Reloaded: Russian Intelligence

The Russian intelligence apparatus is composed of four main agencies.

The SVR (Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii) is the external intelligence agency that focuses on foreign intelligence collection and is often compared to America’s CIA. While not entirely accurate, the comparison is somewhat apt.

The FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii) is the internal security and counterintelligence service that focuses on domestic intelligence, and is roughly the equivalent of America’s FBI.

The GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije) is the military foreign intelligence service that commands the Spetsnaz special operations units and a very rough equivalent of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Finally, the FSO (Federalnaya sluzhba okhrany) protects the Russian president but also…

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