Schneier on Security: Attack Trends: 2004 and 2005
Schneier on Security: Attack Trends: 2004 and 2005: "Attack Trends: 2004 and 2005
Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., monitors more than 450 networks in 35 countries, in every time zone. In 2004 we saw 523 billion network events, and our analysts investigated 648,000 security 'tickets.' What follows is an overview of what's happening on the Internet right now, and what we expect to happen in the coming months.
In 2004, 41 percent of the attacks we saw were unauthorized activity of some kind, 21 percent were scanning, 26 percent were unauthorized access, 9 percent were DoS (denial of service), and 3 percent were misuse of applications."
After the launch of 3DMark03 Build 320 Futuremark has received reports from the members of its BETA Program concerning certain anomalies with 3DMark03 and Nvidia drivers. ExtremeTech (www.extremetech.com) has published an article on suspecting NVIDIA drivers to improperly boost scores on Futuremark’s 3DMark03. Some of these anomalies have also been reported by Beyond3D2. Alarmed by all these reports Futuremark has conducted a thorough internal audit regarding this matter and has verified that certain NVIDIA drivers indeed seem to have detection mechanisms, which are triggered by components of the 3DMark03 program. We have identified eight such mechanisms.
In our testing, all identified detection mechanisms stopped working when we altered the benchmark code just trivially and without changing any of the actual benchmark workload. With this altered benchmark, NVIDIA’s certain products had a performance drop of as much as 24.1% while competition’s products performance drop stayed within the margin of error of 3%. To our knowledge, all drivers with these detection mechanisms were published only after the launch of 3DMark03. According to industry’s terminology, this type of driver design is defined as ‘driver cheats’.
