(MENAFN- Gulf Times) With several organisations in Qatar adopting the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) network, there can be many security challenges in the coming days, warns an expert from A10 Networks.
Although only 25% of websites completely support IPv6 today, many more are supporting v6 in parts of their network.
Glen Ogden, regional sales director, Middle East at A10 Networks says that IPv6 introduces not just another attack vector but an attack volume € one that encompasses a parallel universe of all DDoS attacks known today. All attack vectors that originate in IPv4, be they volumetric or application attacks, can also occur in IPv6.
As the number of connected devices grows, so too will IPv6. By 2020 it is estimated that there will be 34 billion connected devices on the Internet.
To mitigate the v6 DDoS parallel attack, organisations should ensure that their DDoS mitigation solution has the same functionality in IPv6 and uses the same hardware for acceleration.
IPv6-based DDoS attacks today are neither as prevalent nor as big as those happening over IPv4 but they are occurring with increasing frequency and sophistication. As IPv6 comes to represent an increasingly bigger part of the network each year, so too will exposure to IPv6-based attacks.
Although only 6% of an organisation's website visitors use IPv6 today, it doesn't mean only that percent will be affected. Since it's best practice for both protocols to share the same interface, i.e. are dual-stacked, flooding the IPv6 interface indiscriminately takes down all users, independent of the Internet Protocol they're on.
Most IPv6 attacks go unnoticed by the untrained eye. Mitigation of DDoS attacks over the next generation protocol starts with training. Security specialists need to know IPv6 well enough to recognise attacks and then mitigate them with the tools at hand. And these tools must have feature and hardware parity in IPv4 and IPv6.
To mitigate the parallel volume of v6 DDoS attacks, it is imperative to go through the organisation's DDoS solution, line by line, feature by feature, to make sure it protects the network as well over IPv6.
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