Companies can cut response times to
distributed denial of service(DDoS) attacks
by up to two-thirds with a new managed service from
BT Managed Services, says Ray Stanton, global
head of BT's business continuity, security and governance
practice.
The new service, launched today (2 October) for UK customers, is
the first to use Arbor
Networks' new threat management system (TMS) technology. This
produces a unique profile of expected traffic for each client.
A network of Arbor threat detectors across BTNet monitors
internet traffic directed at a website to identify traffic surges
and patterns of activity that could signal a DDoS attack. When an
attack happens, network managers divert traffic through a
mitigation device to filter out attack traffic and allow genuine
traffic through to the client's site. This cuts response times from
30 minutes to 10 minutes, Stanton said.
A 2006
DTI study said 14% of large UK businesses reported a DDoS
attacks that year, and Estonia's IP-based communications networks
were shut down by a massive sustained attack in May.
Arbor Networks' Jose Nazario said, "We have seen 128 unique DDoS
attacks on Estonian websites in the past two weeks. Of these, 115
were ICMP floods, four were TCP SYN floods, and nine were generic
traffic floods. Attacks were not distributed uniformly, with some
sites seeing more attacks than others."
Although the Estonian attacks probably had political motives,
Stanton said, "Today's bot networks are now more likely to be
controlled by criminals than hackers for profit. They use them to
send phishing e-mails and other spam, for click fraud, as an
extortion tool against businesses."
Jack Boyle, Arbor Networks' CEO, said, "BT is the first company
in Europe to use our auto-mitigation technology in this way and we
have worked closely with them to deliver a genuine first-to-market
system."
BT plans to extend the service to European and US markets in the
future.