Neustar Announces SiteProtect to Fend of Denial of Service Attacks

Neustar, Inc, a premier provider of market-leading and innovative solutions and directory services, has introduced SiteProtect, a cloud-based service for UltraDNS customers.

According to company officials, the recently launched SiteProtect brings a new level of security against Distributed Denial of Service attacks to online properties. It also allows customers' Web infrastructure to operate normally while under attack.

SiteProtect, combined with Neustar UltraDNS, provides customers with security for both domain name system and Web traffic. When a DDoS attack occurs, SiteProtect is activated by a DNS change in the UltraDNS Management Portal, also accessible via a mobile application. The customers' traffic is routed to the cloud-based traffic scrubbing centers where legitimate traffic is forwarded on while the attack traffic is contained.

"The problem with other approaches to DDoS protection is that the network needs to take a hit before mitigation is started," said Rick Rumbarger, Senior Director, Product Management, Neustar Internet Infrastructure Services, in a press release. "With SiteProtect, the brunt of the attack is immediately shifted away from the client infrastructure and directed to our mitigation cloud service. By moving this service to the cloud, customers no longer have to buy and maintain large capacity infrastructure with its resulting capex expenses."

According to Arbor Networks, Inc., from 2009 to 2010, the industry has seen the average size of these attacks double, further reinforcing the need for prevention and protection. Pro-WikiLeaks attacks that targeted Visa and MasterCard (News - Alert) in 2010, for example.

The explosive growth of social media channels provides fertile ground for the growth of online support for attacks with political or criminal motivations.  Increasingly simple online attack tools are disseminated to a large numbers of recruits in the same fashion.

In related news, the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group, Ireland’s largest telecommunications software research center, has selected "PathFinder," a GSMA (News - Alert) managed service operated by Neustar, to manage complex IP routing scenarios in an IP Multimedia Systems network environment.