The Consumer Desktop - The Weak Link in Internet Security and Why ISP's Are Uniquely Positio

The Internet community today is seeing a rapidly growing number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. At the same time the sophistication of these attacks is maturing, making defense more and more difficult. Common to all DDoS attacks is the requirement for 'drones' or 'zombies' desktops or hosts that have been compromised in a way that lets an attacker utilize these systems as proxies to generate attack traffic while maintaining the anonymity of the attacker. The growing community of consumer desktops with 'always-on' Internet connections provides attackers with a large source of potential drones. Securing the consumer desktop and choking off this source of drones is one of several ways to reduce the occurrence of DDoS attacks. This paper demonstrates why consumer desktops are particularly vulnerable to compromise what options are available today to protect the consumer desktop and why Internet Service Providers (ISP's) are particularly well positioned to improve the security of consumer desktops.