In February of 2000, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was unleashed on several of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the Internet. The attack rendered yahoo.com, cnn.com, amazon.com, fbi.gov, and several other sites completely unreachable to normal users, as it tied up routers for several hours with large-byte ICMP packet transfers, also called a ping flood. The attack was brought on by unknown assailants using specially created, widely available programs that scanned vulnerable network servers, installed client applications called trojans on the servers, and timed an attack with every infected server flooding the victim sites and rendering them unavailable. Many blame the attack on fundamental flaws in the way routers and the protocols used are structured to accept all incoming data, no matter where or for what purpose the packets are sent.

This brings us to the new millennium, a time where an estimated 945 Million people use or have used the Internet worldwide (Computer Industry Almanac, 2004). At the same time:

Computer security has become a quantifiable and justifiable expense for all IT budgets. Organizations that require data integrity and high availability elicit the skills of system administrators, developers, and engineers to ensure 24x7 reliability of their systems, services, and information. Falling victim to malicious users, processes, or coordinated attacks is a direct threat to the success of the organization.

Unfortunately, system and network security can be a difficult proposition, requiring an intricate knowledge of how an organization regards, uses, manipulates, and transmits its information. Understanding the way an organization (and the people that make up the organization) conducts business is paramount to implementing a proper security plan.