Hackers shift DoS attack tactics

The Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert) co-ordination centre reported last week that the targets of denial of service (DoS) attacks are changing, and are becoming more sophisticated and damaging.

According to Cert, early DoS attacks overloaded web servers with simple tools that generated and sent packets of information to a single destination.

But attacks are now increasingly likely to involve large numbers of packets, from single or multiple sources, against multiple targets.

Cert warned that the most recent and effective method of attack used routers. "Routers make attractive targets because they are more a part of the network than computer systems ... and are often less protected by security policy and monitoring technology," said the report.