Telstra DoS Attack Protection Questioned

Increased reportage of denial of service attacks on Telstra’s network recently has raised questions about the telco’s security protection, which has been criticised as a “reactive” approach by one industry specialist. The country’s number one telco was struck by a number of DoS attacks near the end of November, three in the space of a week in fact, with one disabling services for about four hours. Since the November attacks, Telstra confirmed it has been struck with a couple of DoS assaults, before the most recently reported weekend attack, which left services inaccessible to users for over an hour. Whilst Telstra claims there are a few things it is looking at doing to enhance security protection in this area, spokesperson Stuart Gray declined to discuss the telco’s plans. “If people know what we’re doing they could look for ways around it,” he said. However, Gray did say that if a targeted DoS attack, which comes from an original IP address, is detected then that IP address is blocked. If it’s a distributed DoS attack – where a number of computers that are vulnerable to worms are used in the orchestration of an attack – Telstra will block that destination address. Full Story