Cyber-attacks are no longer stories for technical journals – they are now front page news.
These attacks are being carried out with increasing sophistication and with devastating results – both financially and to an organization’s reputation. The cost of these attacks is also staggering. According to the “2013 Cost of Data Center Outages” from Ponemon Institute, cyber-attacks can cost an average of $822,000 per incident.
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are commonly used to saturate the infrastructure (network routers, firewalls and application servers) with a large number malicious requests in an effort to leave the application unresponsive to legitimate traffic. The best line of defense against these threats is a good perimeter security to protect network and application resources. The edge protection device or service can divert malicious traffic to a Scrubbing Center (SC) or service. The SC will cleanse and forward only the legitimate traffic back to the customer network, thus eliminating the denial of service threat from the customer network.
Defense Messaging (also called Signaling) is a technique used to enhance on-premise data center security detection and mitigation solutions with cloud-based scrubbing. Defense Messaging can accelerate the response time required to mitigate a denial of service attack. Increasingly, application traffic is encrypted, so sophisticated DoS attacks may also encrypt their attacks with SSL/TLS to degrade application response. The intent here is to starve resources from valid user requests. In such situations, web application firewalls and application delivery controllers may use defense messaging to quickly signal to perimeter security devices or external scrubbing services to stay protected against encrypted denial of service attacks.
Defense Messaging is an efficient, responsive and cost-effective way for organizations to respond to sophisticated encrypted attacks directed at network, security and application infrastructure. Radware offers comprehensive solutions to help detect and mitigate denial of service attacks.