Forget about fast lanes, who is worrying about secure lanes?
The FCC voted recently to approve a proposal allowing select companies the ability to pay a premium price to their ISPs in order to deliver their content with a faster service, or 'fast lane' when transiting their networks. There has been considerable discussion both for and against the proposal with respect to how it adheres to the philosophy of net neutrality and how it might impact competition among businesses, particularly small entrepreneurial ventures without the resources to afford premium delivery service.
Unfortunately, the debate’s focus on faster delivery has failed to contemplate the growing need for other types of premium offerings such as 'secure services' and some vitally important questions have been overlooked in the discussion: How will this proposal alter the security threat landscape? Has the security impact of faster delivery services been fully considered and are mitigation technologies prepared to deal with potential threats introduced by this new asymmetry? Why are customers content to pay for the delivery of DDoS attacks and cyber threats under the current unsecure delivery model, and why would they pay for them to be delivered even faster than ever before? It seems counterintuitive.
UK webhost 123-Reg in DDOS attack
Businesses using 123-Reg's web hosting service were knocked offline on Wednesday evening following a reported distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
123-Reg is the UK's largest domain provider hosting over 1.4 million websites. The company said it was hit by a DDoS style attack that caused disruption to some customers on its shared hosting packages.
