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State of the Practice of Computer Security Incident Response Teams ...

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Figure 14: Attack Sophistication Versus Required Intruder Knowledge<br />

In 2002, <strong>the</strong> CERT/CC published a short paper, “Overview <strong>of</strong> Attack Trends” [CERT 02b],<br />

which highlighted <strong>the</strong>se major trends:<br />

• automation and speed <strong>of</strong> attack tools<br />

The level <strong>of</strong> automation <strong>of</strong> attack tools continues to increase. Today’s scanning tools use<br />

more advanced scanning patterns to maximize impact and speed. Some tools exploit<br />

identified vulnerabilities as part <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> scanning activity, and o<strong>the</strong>rs may self-initiate a<br />

new attack on those compromised systems, increasing <strong>the</strong> speed <strong>of</strong> propagation. Distributed<br />

attack tools have enabled attackers to manage and coordinate large numbers <strong>of</strong> deployed<br />

attack tools distributed across <strong>the</strong> Internet. These distributed attack tools can not<br />

only launch DoS attacks more efficiently, but also scan for o<strong>the</strong>r potential victims and<br />

compromise vulnerable systems, while taking advantage <strong>of</strong> readily available public<br />

communications protocols (such as Internet Relay Chat and instant messaging) to coordinate<br />

<strong>the</strong>ir functions.<br />

• increasing sophistication <strong>of</strong> attack tools<br />

110 CMU/SEI-2003-TR-001

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