World IPv6 Launch Day: A Security Risk?

When World IPv6 Launch Day dawns on June 6th, IPv6 services will be enabled on thousands of sites around the world and left on. But is your organization be ready for the new security issues raised by IPv6? In an interview with eSecurity Planet, Chief Security Officer Danny McPherson of VeriSign cautioned that IPv6 is both an opportunity and a potential security risk. The new security challenges derive from a lack of IPv6 security visibility, McPherson said. “A lot of security devices and controls for Internet infrastructure don’t have the same functional parity as IPv4,” McPherson said. “So what happens is that you now have systems out there that are listening and accessible with the exact same content as IPv4, but you don’t have the same visibility and control to protect those resources.” So how should an enterprise organization navigate the IPv6 transition? McPherson emphasizes that visibility and controls for IPv6 should be in place on the network before IPv6 is enabled by default.