DDoS: All Hope is Not Lost

DDoS: All Hope is Not Lost

With recent news revealing that the TalkTalk UK hack was preempted by a Denial of Service attack, Axiom feels the time is right to reiterate the sentiment that all businesses are susceptible to the dangers of these attacks.

Cloud “Scrubbing” and intelligent routing will not be enough to protect the American core transport infrastructure throughout the coming cyber-attacks of tomorrow. Powerful, efficient, and scalable appliance-based solutions like the Axiom Sentinel are where tomorrow’s protection exists, today.

For those of you that do not know, a Denial of Service attack occurs when a malicious entity sends more traffic to your network than it can handle. When this occurs, your network equipment can become overloaded and fail into a state known as “hub mode” in an effort to maintain communication across the network. When this “hub mode” is enabled, all of the traffic on your network is blasted to every port, allowing an attacker to gather meta and packet data in an effort to map topology of your equipment.

Having a map of your network makes it easier for attackers to push forward with deeper penetration into your infrastructure, allowing them to breach data systems and steal information about your business and clients.

Over the past two years, a popular defense against these attacks has been to pipe your Web domain through a cloud scrubbing service that filters out requests not coming from legitimate users. While these services do a good job of keeping your Web site up and running, the continued use of Cloud scrubbing stems from the ill-conceived idea that DOS and DDoS are only about taking a service off-line, or restricting access.

The bottom line is that these services often only:
1) Protect your domain against application layer (HTTP, HTTPS) traffic.
2) Stem the flood of traffic at their Cloud data center, creating a failure scenario wherein that attack is eventually routed to you. Effectively leaving your susceptible to the brunt of the attack.

Do you run a compliance environment? Payment Cards Standards has recently stated that simply doing business with a “PCI Compliant Cloud Provider” does not make that traffic compliant. Similarly, a HIPPA certified cloud environment will not provide the same level of compliance as your certified internal network.

The bottom line: Working with cloud security providers in standards complaint environments is still an exercise in time and well-formed business agreements.
Axiom engineers believe that to effectively defend against today’s DOS-type attacks, best practices involve protection both up-stream and at the edge of your network using powerful, appliance-based, solutions like Axiom Sentinel. These premise-installed devices are capable of analyzing and processing over one-hundred million packets per second, enough to mitigate some of the largest enterprise-targeted DOS and DDOS attacks.

When deployed in combination with a multitude of failover internet circuits, Axiom Sentinel will keep your network and business online and communicating when the worst attacks come downstream.

Wherein your provider has failed to mitigate the attack, or ported your traffic to stop the flow of packets into their own network, Axiom’s Sentinel allows you to use your backup internet circuits while continuing to defend against any malicious data coming from the compromised route.

Easy deployment, intelligent management, flexible placement, and industry-leading performance make Axiom Sentinel the most robust security platform available on the market.

Why only protect your Web-site when you can protect your entire network.

Axiom’s solutions come in different sizes and all our solutions are designed to deal with the attack vectors of today while being adaptive and flexible enough to continue to secure your network for years to come. For more information, check out our website at axiomcyber.com or give us a call us at (800) 519-5070. #FightBackWithAxiom

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