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INDUSTRY NEWS


16 May 2008

Businesses warned of surge in brute-force SSH attacks


IT organisations have been urged to ensure that their servers are fully secured, after a firm monitoring internet-based threats reported a five-fold rise in the number of secure shell (SSH) attacks taking place.

According to Sans Internet Storm Centre (ISC), the increasing prevalence of brute-force SSH attacks could be the beginning of a new trend in hacker activity.

An SSH attack is a sort of dictionary attack, which involves flooding the server with different username and password combinations in an attempt to bypass the login.

Scott Fendley, an incident handler at the centre, produced revealing statistics from hacking-prevention website denyhosts.net, which indicated that the number of SSH attacks rose from an average of 2,000 to nearly 10,000 on Monday May 12th, 2008, SC magazine reports.

According to the magazine, he wrote on the ISC website: "There does appear to be a significant new trend of which we all should be aware."

Meanwhile, a Swiss developer has discovered a software bug in BSD, an open source Unix operating system, that remained unnoticed for 25 years.

BSD developer Marc Balmer wrote on his blog that the problem is also apparent in BSD-derived systems, including Apple's Darwin, the core of Mac OS X.

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

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