There’s been a significant increase in the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks being launched simply because there is more IT processing power that can be easily commandeered being made available. Most recently, just about every website on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. was crippled by a DDoS attack that leveraged consumer devices connected to the Internet. The fundamental problem is that these brute-force attacks can now be launched at rates of volume that easily overwhelm most existing network and security infrastructure.
To better mitigate that issue, Corsa Technology announced today that it is making available software to combat high-volume DDoS attacks on programmable 100G switches it developed.
Corsa CEO Bruce Gregory says demand for the company’s high-performance switches has up until now been pretty much limited to web-scale companies and other instances of high-performance computing (HPC) applications. But with the advent of larger DDoS attacks, Gergory says, Corsa software-defined switches are now being deployed to specifically combat those threats in the form of a NSE7000 Network Security Enforcement engine dubbed Red Armor.
The NSE7000 fits in a 1RU rack and Corsa claims it performs in-line traffic classification and filtering on L3/L4 fields at 150Mpps per 100Gbps of throughput. It employs BGP Flowspec (RFC5575) rules or REST calls to deny or rate-limit traffic destined for a router. It enforces IP src/dst, TCP/UDP src/dst, TCP flags, fragmentation bits and packet length and can rate-limit any rule to help when there is uncertainty whether an attack is legitimate or simply a false positive.
Gregory says IT organizations should expect to see even larger DDoS attacks in 2017. In fact, Gregory says, many IT experts believe DDoS attacks are now being used to probe for vulnerabilities.
“The cybercriminals launching these attacks will be back,” says Gregory.
DDoS attacks are already extremely disruptive. But as organizations start to launch more digital business initiatives, many of them are about to discover just how much potential revenue can be held hostage by targeted DDoS attacks. The question then becomes how much they are willing to invest in DDoS defenses versus what it might cost in Bitcoins to make the attackers go away.
