“Although Christmas festivities are fast approaching, before
network managers relax too much it would be wise to apply the
latest Bind patches to DNS servers and lock down CGI access on your
web servers. The word on the lips of security experts is that
network managers have more to contend with this Christmas than
Santa’s elves, as a multitude of advisories recommend that hatches
be battened down against Smurfs and Zombies.”
“A warning from Internet Security Systems (ISS) X-Force, states
that hundreds of computers are already infected with ‘zombie’
agents. These can be used by hackers to commandeer the machines and
cripple servers by flooding sites with a huge number of spurious
requests, in a repeat of February’s massive attack on
ebusinesses.”
“In general, network managers haven’t faced any new threats
over the last year. The Sans Institute’s “top 10 reasons for
security breaches” has remained unchanged for the last few
years.”