The Data Driver

By: Chris Gale, EMEA Partner Director at A10 Networks
Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are networking devices that reside in the data centre and serve as a key part of an application delivery network. With the explosion in Internet traffic, business applications, and the number of Internet-enabled devices, application delivery controllers provide the front-end intelligence that supplements and enhances business application flows. In addition to traditional load balancing, application delivery controllers provide a host of features that maintain the availability, speed, and security of Internet-based applications. More advanced application delivery controllers offer critical data centre functions such as application acceleration, layer 4-7 load balancing, application health-checks, SSL offload, DNS application firewalls, and DDoS protection.

More than one in five companies that suffered DDoS attacks found that their problems continued for several days, or even weeks, according to a survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International. The consequences of a DDoS attack can range from limited access to online services to their complete unavailability, but even a small incident can lead to financial losses.

Akamai Technologies released a new cybersecurity threat advisory. The advisory alerts the security community, device vendors, Internet service providers and enterprises to the risk of massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks involving Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) devices. The advisory is available for download from Prolexic (now part of Akamai) atwww.prolexic.com/ssdp.
PLXsert has observed the use of a new reflection and amplification DDoS attack that deliberately misuses communications protocols that come enabled on millions of home and office devices, including routers, media servers, web cams, smart TVs and printers. The protocols allow devices to discover each other on a network, establish communication and coordinate activities. DDoS attackers have been abusing these protocols on Internet-exposed devices to launch attacks that generate floods of traffic and cause website and network outages at enterprise targets.