Six years ago, I warned the U.S. Senate that it was possible to "take down the Internet in 30 minutes."

There are still critical weaknesses in central points of the public network. Although more distributed now, remote points can still be harnessed to cause disruption and confusion in ways similar to distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). These methods refer to a threat model embodied by the collective Internet. An Internetwide outage would affect everyone on the Web, but corporations, organizations and governments face even greater threat models that encompass much more acute localized pain and risk.

One of the oldest and least modified over the years has been the insider threat -- hackers infiltrating internal networks. This threat is more common than insider attacks or destruction. The infiltration is achieved in various ways common to network interlopers and attackers, and most importantly, it is largely missed by existing audit and intrusion-detection systems (IDS).

By Mudge at Computerworld.

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