Watson, who's scheduled to present that research here at the CanSecWest 2004 conference this week, referred to the media reaction as an “inordinate level of attention in respect to the amount of risk.” At greatest risk, he said, may be e-commerce sites that manage their own routers…
VANCOUVER, British Columbia–Widespread reports about a flawed communications protocol making the Internet vulnerable to collapse were overblown, according to the researcher credited with uncovering the security problem.
A flaw in the most widely used protocol for sending data over the Net–TCP, or the Transmission Control Protocol–was addressed by most large Internet service providers during the last two weeks and presents little danger to major networks, said Paul Watson, a security specialist for industry automation company Rockwell Automation. If left unfixed, the weakness could have allowed a knowledgeable attacker to shut down connections between certain hardware devices that route data over the Net.
“The actual threat to the Internet is really small right now,” Watson said on Wednesday. “You could have isolated attacks against small networks, but they would most likely be able to recover quickly.”
Watson was responding to news reports that ran Tuesday, after Britain's national emergency response team, the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre, released an advisory about the issue based on his research. Watson, who's scheduled to present that research here at the CanSecWest 2004 conference this week, referred to the media reaction as an “inordinate level of attention in respect to the amount of risk.”
At greatest risk, he said, may be e-commerce sites that manage their own routers–those sites may not believe they're vulnerable to attack and may not have implemented a fix. Sites that have routers that share information on the most efficient paths through the Internet–using the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP–are most vulnerable to the attacks. [Privacy Digest]