INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
Data centres in
the crosshairs
Every day, attackers conspire to take down applications
and steal data, leaving your data centre infrastructure in
the crosshairs. Storing the most valuable and most visible
assets in your organisation – your web, DNS, database, and
email servers – data centres have become the number one
target of cyber criminals, hacktivists and state-sponsored
attackers. Below, Glen Ogden, Regional Sales Director,
Middle East at A10 Networks, describes the most dangerous
threats to your data centre.
D
DoS attacks
Servers are a prime target for
Distributed Denial of Service
(DDoS) attacks and, increasingly, they
are an attack weapon in the escalating
war to disrupt and disable essential
Internet services. While web servers
have been at the receiving end of DDoS
attacks for years, attackers are now
exploiting web application vulnerabilities
to turn web servers into “bots.” Once
attackers have drafted unwitting web
servers into their virtual army, they use
these servers to attack other websites.
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By leveraging web, DNS and NTP servers,
attackers can amplify the size and the
strength of DDoS attacks.
Web application attacks
When cyber criminals and hacktivists
aren’t busy taking down websites with
DDoS attacks, they are launching web
attacks like SQL injection, cross-site
scripting (XSS) and cross-site request
forgery (CSRF). They strive to break
into applications and steal data for
profit. And increasingly, attackers target
vulnerable web servers and install
malicious code in order to transform
them into DDoS attack sources.
CMS applications aren’t the only
applications at risk. In fact, 96% of all
applications currently have or have had
vulnerabilities, and the median number
of vulnerabilities per application was 14
in 2013.
DNS infrastructure: Attack
target and collateral damage
DNS servers have gained the dubious
distinction of becoming a top attack
target for two reasons. First, taking
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