Do you manage a firewall and want to find the source of malicious network activity? – Check out the Internet Malicious Activity Map

For those of you who manage your own network, you have to consider the strength of the firewall at your network perimiter, the knowledge and skills of those who manage it. You also have to provide technology that can help protect your mobile users. Part of building that secure environment is understanding the environment out there in the wild world web.This is just one of the resources available out there. Please leave feedback if you are aware of others that might be useful to readers.

I recently came across an interesting graph that shows where some of the malicious traffic originates from on the internet. It is called the Internet malicious activity map (PNG) The graph is from Team Cymru. The graph displays in “heatmap” style in a Hilbert Curve (check this out if you are a fan of fractals). This is an interesting way to graph a lot of data in a small space. As is true in heatmaps, the colors indicate the concentration of malicious activity. The lighter the color, the higher the malicious activity. Take a look at the 85.x.x.x/8, 87.x.x.x/8, and 88.x.x.x/8 sections of the graph. Looks like these networks are major sources of malicious activity on the internet. I would recommend reviewing this graph and determining if the address ranges showing high malicious activities are part of your organization’s network. If so, then be very concerned. If not, then does your network receive any traffic originating on these subnets? Maybe you should consider blocking traffic from these source subnets. See the Team Cymru Malevolence Monitoring website for more security oriented information.

Thanks for reading and let’s be good network citizens!