I was getting caught up today on my backlog of security blog reading, and noted that Ivan Ristic had a good post on his prediction that 2008 will be the year that the web application firewall 'takes off' in the mainstream market as opposed to simply being viewed as a security geek's toy.

Ivan considers how pervasive network firewalls have become (no IT manager in his/her right mind would even consider running a network without one) but the same consciousness doesn't yet exist regarding application firewalls. The same managers that believe in network firewalls are rolling the dice every day hoping that the web applications they've deployed publicly don't get compromised - even though they know the network firewalls do nothing to protect their web apps. Reminds me of some research that Gunnar Peterson did that shows the silliness of this comparative ignorance.

2% of overall internet traffic is malicious according to estimates by Arbor Networks. Most of the attacks are Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) related meaning that attackers use a network of computers across the globe to simply send a large volume of requests to the victim server, essentially flooding it with s0 much traffic that it can't keep up. The victim ultimately stops responding or goes down, creating a interruption in service for non-malicious users.

Arbor says that it is seeing 1,300 such attacks per day, and that spikes in the level of DDoS attacks can account for up to 5% of overall traffic.