London, UK, 15:30 GMT 14th February 2000 - In the aftermath of the
recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and just one week before
the City eForum event on "Protecting Reward against eRisk organised
in conjunction with Alexander Forbes at Lloyd's of London, mi2g revealed
that most serious electronic attacks taking place against financial institutions,
multi-nationals and major on-line businesses are covert and seldom become
public knowledge.
The current incidents of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are
quite correctly receiving publicity - the victims are well known and their
inability to trade on line affects millions of internet users as well as interruption
to business. Such negative publicity has already had an impact on share price,
in some cases with falls in the range of 5% to 9% over the 72 hours after
the attack. Each monitored incident may have caused the target organisation
losses to the tune of £1 to £5 Million per hour of attack.
At Lloyd's of London, mi2g will reveal how off-the-shelf technology
solutions are no longer enough to combat sustained DDoS attack. Piracy of
intellectual property and internet based financial fraud, both occur in far
more subtle ways and over a longer period of time by aggressors who cover
their tracks through the use of surrogacy.
It is being argued that the most effective form of defence for this type
of distributed attack would be to launch a tit for tat crippling counter-attack.
However, this approach is ill advised because it is fraught with legal obstacles
and downstream liability. For starters who bears responsibility for the actions
of either party when surrogacy has occurred? "There
are very few security architectures that have been built with sufficient reserve
systems and multiple hidden ports to anticipate and deal with such distributed
attacks. Our bespoke security architecture does address this issue",
said DK Matai, Managing Director of mi2g, who will be addressing an
invited audience at Lloyd's of London on Wednesday 23rd February.
Notes for the Editor:
1. See www.mi2g.com for eForum details
2. For additional information - contact Nicolas Stevenson, ns@mi2g.com; Tel:
07000 64 24 00
