Micron21 leverages the NSFOCUS Anti-DDoS System to identify new DDoS technique

NSFOCUS, provider of distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation solutions, has announced that its Anti-DDoS System (ADS) has been instrumental in assisting Australian data centre Micron21 to detect and mitigate an emerging type of  DDoS threat, which Micron21 calls a 'combination distributed reflective denial of service (CDRDoS)'.

On August 2, 2014, Micron21 detected a threat that targeted one of its customers and reached speeds of 40+gbits internationally and over 1.2gbits within Australia. The company believes it represents the beginning of what is to be expected in the future of denial of service attacks. The CDRDoS attack uses a combination of UDP* attack vectors simultaneously, from a single attack tool. This includes NTP*, DNS*, SSDP* and CHARGEN* reflection amplification traffic that targets a single host. The company suspects the addition of SNMP will be added to further increase attack capacity in the near future.

Micron21 relies upon the NSFOCUS ADS for DDoS protection services. In response to ongoing threats, Micron21 expanded its portfolio to include a DDoS Protection as a Service programme in early 2013. The company provides a variety of data scrubbing options for its clients and has integrated the ADS family of products into its service model to assist them in detecting and mitigating against DDoS threats.

To fight against volumetric and sophisticated attacks, NSFOCUS provides an "all-in-one" anti-DDoS solution for small to medium businesses (SMBs) and integrated protection solutions for hosting service providers, Internet data centres such as Micron21, and large enterprises.

Terence Chong, Solutions Architect, NSFOCUS, said: "In order to stay ahead of the ongoing threats perpetrated by aggressive hacker groups, hosting providers and Internet data centres are looking for solutions that not only protect customer data but also their own brand reputation. Micron21 is a perfect example of how data centres can supplement their offerings by incorporating DDoS-mitigation-as-a-service to increase ROI and ensure customer loyalty."

James Braunegg, Managing Director of Micron21 Datacentre, said: "By proactively monitoring our infrastructure and customer networks, we can provide around-the-clock protection and support to adapt to threats dynamically as they occur, with real-time visibility. By integrating the NSFOCUS anti-DDoS system into our platform, our staff is able to monitor and resolve issues before they are noticed and provide the ability to react within seconds of being alerted to any threat across our network."

*Character generation protocol, or CHARGEN, is meant for testing and measurement but can be abused by hackers.

Domain name server, service, or system, abbreviated DNS, is how the Internet translates names into IP addresses.

NTP, network time protocol, synchronises times from one computer to another.

SSDP, simple service discovery protocol, maintains a list of available network services.

UDP stands for user datagram protocol, a method of exchanging messages across the Internet.