Rabobank Faces Ddos Attacks

By Author: eccuni
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Recently, Rabobank suffered distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack resulting in disruption of Internet banking and mobile banking services. Customers of the bank were not able to login to their online accounts. Rabobank with Headquarters in Utrecht, Netherlands operates in 48 countries across world and specializes in food and agricultural finance. Information security professionals are investigating the attack and are yet to determine the source of attack. The attack follows a similar attack on a Dutch government website, rijksoverheid.nl. The latest attack reportedly hampered operations of the Dutch payment system iDeal, making it difficult for associated banks to process payments.

Websites are frequent targets of DDoS attacks. Attackers identify and exploit vulnerabilities to gain remote control of large number of computers. They then issues commands to the compromised computer systems to make multiple requests to a targeted web resource. The simultaneous requests overload the server making it difficult to process legitimate requests. In the recent past, Russian media and blog sites, Malaysian online news sites ...
... and a U.S based online activism site suffered DDoS attacks. Inability to provide services may adversely affect the business of organizations and result in financial losses. Banks have to deal with customer complaints.

The latest Network infrastructure security report by Arbor Networks indicates sharp rise in scale and frequency of DDoS attacks during last year. The largest attack size was over 100GB per second. The report highlights increase in application layer attacks, which target both ancillary support services of operators and their end-customers.

Slow network performance, increase in spam e-mails, unavailability of a website, inaccessibility of files stored on the network are some of symptoms, which indicate that a network is facing DDoS attacks. Organizations must regularly monitor the web traffic to identify any unusual traffic to the site. They may block the range of IP addresses participating in the attacks. Configuring firewalls to block data from suspected IP addresses may help in dealing with DDoS attacks. Attackers also target mail servers of an organization. Therefore, organizations must configure their mail servers with filters and software blocking DDoS programs. Regular evaluation of website security may help in preventing attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities. Proactive identification of threats is crucial to safeguard networks. Network administrators may take advantage of online university degree courses to upgrade their technical skills and know-how.

Hiring experienced professionals qualified in computer science degree and network administration may help organizations in regular patch management, timely detection of threat vectors, initiating mitigating measures and strengthening the defenses against security threats. Organizations may also work with Internet security firms to install requisite intrusion detection and prevention systems to block malicious application requests and secure the network against application level DDOS attacks.

Timely communication of threats and proactive engagement with various stakeholders is crucial to deal with the vibrant threats in the IT environment. E-learning programs and online degree courses may help IT professionals in improving their soft skills.

Regular adherence to security advisories, installing necessary software updates, updating security software, use of user accounts may help Internet users in safeguarding their computer systems from malware downloads and unauthorized access.