Asta extends product to provide protection from DoS attacks

May 16, 2001
May 16, 2001--Asta Networks, a network reliability company, announced it has extended its product to provide the first comprehensive protection from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks across an entire national network.

Asta Networks, a network reliability company, announced it has extended its product to provide the first comprehensive protection from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks across an entire national network.

Asta Networks' distributed technology is now deployed throughout the Internet2 Abilene backbone, which uses high-speed optics to connect 180 universities across the United States. Asta Networks' deployment at Internet2 protects over 50 Gigabits per second of aggregate capacity, consisting primarily of OC-48 links, which are one thousand times faster than a standard DSL connection.

Asta Networks has noticed several new trends regarding zombies, the innocent machines that hackers compromise to launch attacks. The latest generation of zombies includes "Pulsing Zombies," which send pulses of attack traffic at the intended target. The discontinuous nature of these attacks makes detection and location of these zombies far more difficult. In addition, Asta Networks has seen that zombies are now being tuned before attacks. In a recent attack attempt, the hackers conducted a rehearsal for their assault, during which attack traffic was directed at the target for a short period of time before the full-scale attack was launched.

Another key trend includes what Asta Networks calls "the new DoS," in which service is not denied but degraded. Under a "Degradation of Service" attack links are not completely overwhelmed but they are unnecessarily burdened with significant amounts of bad traffic. In one case, the target received six times its average amount of traffic. Most businesses pay for bandwidth on a per-usage basis, meaning that this type of DoS attack not only slows performance, but costs money. And because the effects aren't immediately noticed, these "Degradation of Service" attacks can go undetected for long periods of time and continuously increase the cost of the attack. Finally, Asta Networks has noticed more attacks being targeted against vulnerable parts of the infrastructure, including routers and Domain Name Servers (DNS).

Asta Networks' initial product, which will be broadly released in June, addresses these and other new attack trends.

About Asta Networks:

Asta Networks develops software and services that increase the reliability, predictability and manageability of networks. For more information, visit www.astanetworks.com.

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