Cisco says attacks are due to operational practices

In an InteractiveWeek article the head of Cisco's security products group says the attacks are an operational problem not a technical problem.

Routers from Cisco and other vendors have the ability to detect the signature patterns of a denial-of-service attack, and the routers can filter out that traffic, Farnsworth said.

"The router knows which sources are legitimate or not and drops on the floor anything suspicious," Farnsworth said. "Generally speaking, ingress filtering and committed rates are effective in terms of preventing [malicious] traffic from ever showing up, or filtering it to a reasonable rate."