Local Area Networks (LANs) in Aircraft - FTP Directory Listing - FAA

• During an 11-month period (April 2000-March 2001), there was a 100 percent
increase in unique scans and an almost 900 percent increase in Intrusion
Detection Alerts, based on Snort [an Intrusion Detection utility].
• In the beginning of 2002, a home network was scanned on average by 31 different
systems a day.” [26]
This list can be supplemented by many other data points including:
• “The most virulent [computer] virus to date infected several million machines in
about 20 minutes….” [15]
• “When we put this [honeypot] machine online it was, on average, hit by a
potential security assault every 15 minutes. None of these attacks were solicited,
merely putting the machine online was enough to attract them. The fastest an
attack struck was mere seconds and it was never longer than 15 minutes before
the honeypot logged an attempt to subvert it. …
• At least once an hour, on average, the BBC honeypot was hit by an attack that
could leave an unprotected machine unusable or turn it into a platform for
attacking other PCs. …
• By using carefully crafted packets of data, attackers hope to make the PC run
commands that hand control of it to someone else. Via this route many malicious
hackers recruit machines for use in what is known as a botnet. This is simply a
large number of hijacked machines under the remote control of a malicious
hacker.” [27]
• “IronPort recently published a report showing that Trojan horses and system
monitors – two of the most serious types of malware – infect one out of every 14
corporate PCs. That means that in an organization of 1,000 desktop PCs, there is
an average of 70 computers that represent a major security risk. … Dwarfing
Trojans and system monitors are less serious types of malware, such as adware
and tracking cookies, which infect 48% and 77% of PCs, respectively.” [28]
• “The number of new [COTS] software security vulnerabilities identified by
security experts, hackers and others during the first eight months of this year
[2006] has already exceeded the total recorded for all of 2005, according to
Internet Security Systems.
Vulnerabilities through September have reached 5,300, leaping past the 5,195
discovered for all of 2005, says Gunter Ollmann, director of the X-Force research
group at ISS. ‘Eight hundred seventy-one were found to affect Microsoft
operating systems, while 701 vulnerabilities were only found to affect Unix
operating system,’ Ollmann says. But many vulnerabilities cross platform
27