A small report made public recently discusses the state of change and the imminent technology changes at ISP level that will naturally afect many new services that are to be introduced onto the World Wide Web.

It is reported that a survey of 132 ISPs from around the world found, in part, that they are suffering from a “general pessimism” because of concerns over new types of attacks, including DNS poisoning, route hijacking, and service-level attacks.

The ISPs are also worried that three significant technology changes — the shift to IP version 6 (IPv6), the adoption of DNS Sec (a new security scheme for domain name servers), and the use of 4-byte Autonomous System Numbers — will render their networks vulnerable.

One of the Chief Scientists at Arbor stated,  “To have so many things happening at once is somewhat unique. Any time you introduce one of these changes, there is concern, but three at once exacerbates the challenge,” adds Labovitz.

Furthermore it goes on to say that while the move to IPv6 is necessary, because ISPs will soon run out of IPv4 addresses, there are a number of back-office systems not prepared to recognize new IPv6 addresses, according to Jennifer Pigg, vice president of the Anywhere Network research program at Yankee Group Research Inc. DNS Sec will improve security for DNSs in the long-term, but can be difficult to implement, she says.