warning from security expert Bruce Schneier<\/a><\/strong>, who\u00a0said these companies have seen an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS)\u00a0attacks against them.<\/p>\nSchneier said the\u00a0companies\u00a0provide\u00a0the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work, and spoke to\u00a0him\u00a0on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n
He said the companies are seeing\u00a0attacks that fit a certain profile: they target multiple attack vectors at once, they are larger and last longer than a normal attack, and they are more sophisticated.<\/p>\n
Attacks would also continue from a higher point than they left off a week before, like someone looking for a point of failure.<\/p>\n
“It doesn’t seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do,” said Schneier.<\/p>\n
Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering, but not common for companies, he added.<\/p>\n
“It feels like a nation’s military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US’s Cold War programme of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defence systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.”<\/p>\n