Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

Security threats, IPv4 address ownership and P2P traffic

February 15th, 2009

Via Circle ID I picked up on this IBM X-Force(R) Trend and Risk Report for 2008. There’s plenty of insight from the Circle ID and IBM executive summary on the headliner treat items ….. sorry typo I meant to say threat items. What I took from the report was on page 40 and [drum roll, please] the most vulnerable operating systems as per usual is ………… Apple Mac OS X. No hang on, no that cannot be right, please explain this one! (Which was followed in the list by Linux Kernal, Sun Solaris and then well you know who).
I’m still scratching my head, well anyway the other item which has caught out my parents twice in the past year is this Scareware trend in malware which for me is just the lowest of scams and a real pain to remove once a machine has been caught. Unfortunately it looks like a trend that is not going to go away for 2009.
As for the shift to IPv6, well its interesting to see what’s happening in the current IPv4 world and according to this report by Gordon Cook were it is outlined how IPv4 numbers are becoming transferable and consequently property, a case is laid out as to how there is a new opportunity to “own” IPv4 addresses, and the report wonders how incumbent services and infrastructure providers are likely to respond. According to the report it looks like it is the beginning of the end for the current “open Internet”.
Pear-2-Pear by Fab:o Fo:s http://flickr.com/photos/fua/
And finally the percentage of peer-to-peer file sharing traffic on the Internet is between 1.2% to 93%, mostly from your home network … or maybe on an academic campus network … or maybe just inconclusive, who knows?