Computerworld - Security lessons from 2012

DDoS attacks on banks, cyberwarfare should be high on security agendas.
 
Computerworld - For all the apocalyptic prognostications, 2012 turned out to be a relatively uneventful year from an information security standpoint.
A cyber Pearl Harbor did not happen. Stuxnet and its kin did not take out any power grids or shut down cities. Mobile threats continued to escalate and malware became more sophisticated, but none were as game-changing in nature as Stuxnet was. While there were still plenty of data breaches, including a handful of big ones, they were much smaller in scope compared to the TJX and Heartland breaches of a few years ago.
Even so, several security related events in 2012 could well be harbingers of things to come in 2013.
DDoS attacks on banks
In the second half of 2012, U.S. financial services organizations became targets of sophisticated, high bandwidth distributed denial-of-service attacks launched by politically and financially motivated groups. Several banks experienced severe disruptions to their online banking operations as a result of the DDoS attacks.
Often, the attacks were accompanied by online fraud and account takeovers. The weapon of choice in many of the attacks was a toolkit called Itosknoproblembro which was capable of generating close to 70GBps of DDoS traffic and designed to launch multiple DDoS attacks simultaneously.
 
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