Team up to fight cyberattacks, US government official urges

Groups of companies in the same industry could pool infrastructure resources to help each other mitigate the effects of cyberattacks and work together on security issues, a senior official in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suggested on Friday.

The comments by Mark Weatherford, deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity, come as a handful of American banks are dealing with a fourth week of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on their websites.
DDoS attacks are one of the simplest forms of cyberattack and seek to push websites offline by overloading them with junk traffic so they cannot handle legitimate requests from users.

The attacks have hit banks including Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC Financial Services Group, Citigroup, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, and have been claimed by hackers in Iran.

"This has been an eye-opening experience for a lot of very, very large organizations," Weatherford said. "It's got a lot of people's attention. Not just the banks, but the ISPs and some of the other third-party providers as well."



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Last Edited by Phennommennonn on 10/21/2012 09:52 AM