A major security vulnerability in TCP stacks is uncovered recently which can knock any website off line with very little effort or bandwidth.
Steve Gibson on Security Now Episode 164 recently discussed this vulnerability referred to as “sockstress”. It’s absolutely scary given the fact that unlike tradition Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDOS) this flaw only requires a single computer with a broadband connection to take down even the mightiest of websites. The flaw also affects routers, and loadbalancers. This as unbelievable as it sounds means that even script kiddies could take down sites like www.google.com if they wanted to.
So while real hackers have developed enormous bot nets to run DDOS attacks they would only need to pointa few of these atonomous machines at a site to bring it down.
This flaw was recently announced by a security company in Europe without first announcing it to major software and hardware manufacturers – a serious mistake in my opinion.
Our concern is that we could start to see this attack in the wild and the most likely targets would be major institutions such as Google, Amazon, Ebay etc. Let’s just hope that the software and hardware manufacturers work quickly to patch their TCP stacks and prevent this situation from turning into a major disaster.
Fingers crossed.