Modern Network Security: The Migration to Deep Packet Inspection

The past few years has seen a radical evolution in the nature and requirements of network security. There are many factors contributing to these changes, the most important of which is the shift in focus from so-called 'network-level' threats, such as connection-oriented intrusions and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, to dynamic, content-based threats such as Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Spyware and Phishing that can spread quickly and indiscriminately, and require sophisticated levels of intelligence to detect. Where attacks like Smurf, Fraggle and the Ping of Death were the key threats in years past, now attacks such as "Microsoft IIS 5.0 printer ISAPI extension buffer overflow vulnerability" and "Unicode directory traversal" are more prevalent, albeit much less imaginatively named.

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