Does your organization ever suffer from slow applications or failed services? Your IT department may honestly, mistakenly, attribute the cause to a mysterious, unpredictable network or operating system problem. The service degradation or interruption may appear to be only “network noise or congestion.” However, often such problems are caused by short, sub-saturating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. They may last only a few minutes, and not be the Terabit scale you’re used to reading about in the press but, these short duration attacks make up around 98% of all DDoS, and they create latency issues and impact service availability every day, impacting thousands of organizations around the world.
Performance Degradation
For some organizations, such service interruption may be only an annoying inconvenience, but for the majority— who rely on the Internet to conduct business— it poses real problems. In many industries, seconds of service interruption matter greatly, and can result in customer churn and loss of revenue. For example, in the highly competitive industry of Carrier, Service, or Hosting Provider environments, even small attacks can impact a customer downstream, and downtime can result in Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations that lead to compensation claims. And, that’s in addition to the negative impact DDoS traffic has on a backbone network, increasing the chances of collateral damage beyond the intended target(s).
Real-Time Network Visibility
How can security teams stop the impacts of such attacks? They are certainly preventable. First of all, they need real-time inspection of all traffic entering their network, with alerts and dashboards that give early warning signs of suspicious and malicious activity. Network level metadata typically contains the leading indicators of unusual activity targeting a network. So, when considering a DDoS mitigation solution organizations should look for one that provides real-time views that summarize network and security activity, including traffic anomalies, link utilization, packets per second rates and numbers of active flows.
Real-Time Detection and Mitigation
Detecting attacks in real-time is essential, and organizations should be aware that most legacy DDoS solutions are simply not fast enough, or effective, at analyzing incoming packets to discern good traffic from bad, and allowing only the good traffic to pass through, unimpeded. In addition, most legacy solutions fail to stop DDoS traffic fast enough to prevent it from doing significant damage (it takes only a few seconds to degrade or interrupt service). When DDoS attacks occur, they need to be surgically blocked in real-time, ideally in seconds, or less.
Reap the Benefits of a Better Network
By having an effective DDoS mitigation system that blocks all types of DDoS attacks, networking and security professionals can spend less time troubleshooting seemingly obscure issues and fielding complaints from internal staff, so they can focus on defending against other nefarious cyber intrusions. Meanwhile, their end-customers, the line of business managers who rely on optimum web application service, can focus on their core daily objectives and not have to deal with unhappy customers. DDoS mitigation is one type of cyber investment that saves time for IT pros, optimizes business continuity, and enhances customer satisfaction.
Corero Network Security is a global leader in real-time, high-performance, automatic DDoS defense solutions. Corero’s industry leading SmartWall and SecureWatch technology protects on-premise, cloud, virtual and hybrid environments with a scalable solution that delivers a more cost-effective economic model than ever before.For more on Corero’s flexible deployment models, click here. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.