Arbor Networks: Mobile Operators Lack Visibility and Control over Security threats

Arbor Networks issued the Sixth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, concluding that "2010 should be viewed as the year distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks became mainstream as many high profile attacks were launched against popular Internet services and other well known targets".

See "Arbor Networks’ Sixth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report" (PR, here) and report (here - registration required).

Arbor's survey ("participants included 111 self-classified Tier 1, Tier 2 and other IP network operators from the US and Canada, Latin/South America, EMEA, Africa and Asia") also indicates that:

• Application-layer DDoS attacks target data center infrastructure
• Mobile operators have limited visibility and control over their networks
• DNS and IPv6 continue to present significant challenges for network operators

See the first chart below for the most significant operational threats reported by the participnats and note that "47% of respondents indicated that they experienced 1 to 10 DDoS attacks per month during the survey period, while an additional 47% experienced 10 to 500 or more DDoS attacks per month".

As for the lack of visibility in mobile packet core - "59% of respondents indicated they have limited or no visibility whatsoever (see chart below)..over 50% indicated that they have no visibility or extremely limited visibility into their network traffic at the Gi interface".

See also "Yankee Group Prediction: A Denial-of-Service Attack Will Take a 4G Network Down" - here.

See also - "AT&T Develops Mobile Security" - here