Over the past two years, research has shown that 45% of cyber attacks are designed to disrupt business in some way.
Mark Wolff, SE (SA), Check Point Software Technologies, speaking at the Check Point Security Tour held in Johannesburg today, said, in 2012, 65% of businesses experienced attacks, and of those attacks, 32% were denial of service (DoS) attacks.
DoS attacks target networks, systems and individual services, and flood them with so much traffic that they either crash or are unable to operate, effectively denying their services to legitimate users.
There are DoS tools freely available that anyone can use, he added, and cited Ion Cannon as an example. Ion Cannon is an open source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application, written in C#, that was released into the public domain, and is now hosted on several open source platforms.
A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute also found that distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), which are co-ordinated and simultaneously launched from multiple sources to overwhelm and disable a target service, rank as one of the top risks among IT practitioners, and in the US, DDoS attacks were the number one concern.
It is fairly obvious when a company has fallen victim to one of these attacks. Symptoms include slow to unresponsive network performance, and possibly unresponsive or unavailable applications.
Protection
To help prevent these attacks, Check Point Technologies has unveiled Check Point DDoS Protector, appliances that deliver multi-layered protection and up to 12Gbps of throughput to help businesses stop and defend against the widest range of DDoS attacks.
The appliances safeguard companies by blocking all major attack types such as network floods, server floods, and application layer DoS attacks, as well as low-and-slow attacks. It provides customers with multi-layered protections that employ a variety of advanced detection and mitigation techniques.
Wolff says the DDoS Protector appliance sits in front of an organisation's perimeter gateway and cleans the traffic from DDoS attacks before it reaches the main security gateway.
The appliances are integrated with the company's management suite to deliver a single point of control over security and provide full visibility of security events.
DDoS Protector appliances were developed in conjunction with Radware, a provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centres. The line consists of seven models that offer organisations low latency, high performance and high port density of up to 16 ports.
Wolff says with super-fast response times, the DDoS Protector appliance blocks a wide range of attacks within seconds, and is easy to customise with specific network environments and security needs in mind. He adds that Check Point customers benefit from 24/7 customer support and access to a dedicated emergency response team.
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