Know Thy ISP

From http://www.pcworld.com/article/168160/ussouth_korea_cyberattack_lessons_learned.html:

"Investigators may not yet know who was behind a series of cyberattacks on the U.S. and South Korea, but analysts are getting a better grasp on where the nations' governments may have gone wrong. Numerous government Web sites in both countries have been hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks, starting on the Fourth of July and continuing into today. Dozens of high-profile sites have been targeted, including those of the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Treasury, and other major federal agencies."

Quote of the day:

"'Too many federal agency security people did not know which network service provider connected their Web sites to the Internet,' explains Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security research organization."

Alan's statement is quite scary, but I'm sure quite true. When the killer clowns come knocking at your firewall's door, you need to be able to pull the plug in a hurry. Perhaps we should have Internet fire drills where we propose a mock DDoS attack and have our technicians play out the scenario. Who ya gonna call?