21 November 2002 -- CoSine Communications, Redwood City, CA, US, has launched DoSShield into Europe. DoSShield is claimed to be the "industry's first proactive prevention for DoS and Distributed DoS attacks".
Based on IPNOS version 3.2, the operating system underlying the fully distributed and virtualised architecture of CoSine's IP Service Delivery Platform, DoSShield provides network-based protection against malicious DoS attacks on enterprise access routers, access links and servers.
"DoS attacks are becoming the commonest form of malicious attacks on enterprise and service provider network and their cost to business can be considerable," said Steve Goggiano, CoSine's president and CEO.
"The recent distributed DoS attack on the Internet's key DNS servers shows the serious threat these attacks pose. IPNOS 3.2 with DoSShield is an example of how CoSine's architecture can integrate new capabilities and technologies."
A DoS attack is a malicious attempt to prevent the legitimate use of a network service, usually by disrupting an end-user's access router, flooding a network connection with false traffic or blocking access to a specific server or application resources.
The impact to a carrier's enterprise customer from such a disruption can include a complete data traffic stoppage for an end-user network, disruption of mission-critical services (FTP, SAP, e-commerce), severely decreased productivity and increased OPEX in order to bring the network back up.
In 2001, a study at the University of Califoria at San Diego detected over 12,800 DoS attacks on over 5,000 targets in just three weeks. A CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security survey found that respondents lost an average of USD287,000 due to DoS attacks.
DoSShield isolates and mitigates the effects of DoS attacks to both the service provider and its enterprise customers. By enabling this capability at the edge of the service provider network, CoSine's DoSShield is in a unique position to protect the enterprise customer's router, on-site servers and the access link itself.
Conventional edge routers can only provide partial rate limiting and filtering capabilities for a router serving hundreds of customers, whereas CoSine's distributed and virtualised architecture allows DoSShield to provide proactive per-customer protection for an enterprise customer's access link, router and servers dramatically extending protection to the enterprise and further enhancing the appeal of networked-based service offerings.