Tata Communications' DDoS Detection And Mitigation Service Helps Protect Network Infrastructure

Tata Communications’ DDoS Detection and Mitigation service, combined with India’s only domestically located DDoS mitigation centre, is specifically designed to defend critical network infrastructure and business applications from frequent cyber attacks being mounted on both Indian government and private computer networks.

The occurrence rate of such cyber attacks is quite high world over. It is estimated there are already close to 50,000 malicious bots in India at present; there are millions more around the globe. The point that officials are making is that there are networks in India and internationally that are controlled from outside — “a sort of cyberspace fifth column.” The danger is that at an appointed time, the external controllers of ‘botnets’ will command the infected networks of “zombie” computers to potentially create a national security emergency by flooding traffic at key network and application infrastructure.

“Research from our global network of security partners shows that 90 percent of security vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable,” said Col A J Vijayakumar, (Indian Army, Retd), CISSP and head of Tata Communications’ Security Services Operations Centre (SOC) in Chennai, India, which manages Tata Communications’ defense-in-depth managed security services suite.

He further added, “The number of disclosed critical computer vulnerabilities grew 28 percent in 2007 and only half of these are addressed by traditional software patching. What’s driving this trend is the increasing complexity of IT, the growth of web applications and the difficulty and cost of retaining capable security staff.”

Tata Communications’ DDoS Detection and Mitigation Security Services provide real-time application-layer analysis of all IP traffic traversing the company’s global IP backbone. By monitoring and analysing customer traffic in real time and on a 24x7x365 basis, Tata Communications provides proactive notification of actionable events to its customers, improving visibility into the security and availability of their networks and applications.

Tata Communications’ security analysts can quickly determine the root cause of changes in traffic, be it a violation of usage policy, a worm outbreak, or a DDoS attack by millions of computers from different parts of the world. Such attack traffic is filtered in the Tata Communications’ backbone before customer resources are impacted, leading to optimum utilisation of bandwidth.

“Achieving an effective state of information security goes far beyond any one security technology,” said John Landau, senior vice president, Managed Solutions, Tata Communications. “The real work lies in enforcing security policies with repeatable processes, having a global view of evolving security threats and correlating tremendous volumes of information to swiftly detect and mitigate security events. A defense-in-depth strategy deploys resources in appropriate roles and in mutually supportive positions. Our aim is to deliver a cost-effective defense-in-depth solution that will allow Indian government and private customers to assess and prevent information security problems such as DDoS attacks.”