The IETF has identified many security threats related to IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. Security concerns around IPv6 deployment are real, although the number of IPv6-based attacks remains small.
"Obviously, as the protocol gets adopted, we're going to see more attacks," says Greg Brown, senior director of McAfee's Network Defense business unit. "Because IPv6 is not broadly deployed, we haven't seen a lot of attacks."

Nonetheless, the number of IPv6-based attacks is on the rise, experts say.

"We're not seeing denial-of-service attacks on IPv6 because most of the targets that people want to attack aren't IPv6,'' says Jason Schiller, senior Internet network engineer, Global IP Network Engineering for the Public IP Network at Verizon Business. But Schiller says he is seeing "quite a bit" of botnet command and control traffic using IPv6.

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