What ISPs Are Scared Of

A new study of Internet service providers (ISP) and their top security concerns lets us know what they're most scared of: armies of zombie computers mounting huge distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.The latest Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report -- this is the third in a annual series from security company Arbor Networks and the University of Michigan singles out groups of computers mounting large-scale attacks as the top provider fear.

Botnets with their ability to aggregate and coordinate hundreds of thousands of compromised computers into a wide-array platform for DDoS assaults capable of shutting down providers, companies and even governments.

Indeed, the FBI lists botnets as a potential threat to both national and economic security.

Of particular concern in the Arbor report is the finding that attack traffic is growing faster than ISP capacity -- attack volume may be more than twice the data capacity of even recently upgraded backbones.

The entire Infrastructure Security Report can be downloaded here. (Free registration required.) It's scary, important reading.