CloudShield News Desk

CloudShield’s Defender Product Line Provides Brains and Brawn Against Holiday DDoS Attacks

CloudShield protects e-commerce sites during holiday shopping seasons

Sunnyvale, Calif. - November 12, 2007

CloudShield Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of IP security and service control solutions, today announced its CloudShield DNS Defender and CloudShield SYN Defender, designed to safeguard e-commerce Web sites and Web infrastructures from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Such solutions are critically important as consumers continue to shop online during the holidays. Today, it is unlikely a Web site, in spite of carefully rendered security measures and extra bandwidth, could sustain a twenty-fold traffic increase without being overwhelmed.

According to Jupiter Research, US online holiday sales will grow to over $39 billion in 2007, an increase of 20% over the 2006's holiday season (1). In fact, spending during November and December constitutes nearly 50% of yearly retail sales (2). However, that could change should a DDoS attack on DNS or Web servers, become successful.

Last December, CloudShield thwarted an attack on a large domain hosting company; more than 100,000 Websites were affected when they were knocked offline. The hosting company first worked with their existing firewall, load balancing and server security vendors with no success. CloudShield resolved the problem within hours of the panic call and within minutes of CloudShield’s installation. This attack represented a 300-fold traffic increase over their normal traffic load.

A typical DNS server resolves thousands of queries per second. CloudShield is able to resolve DNS queries at over 800,000 per second, or more than a hundred times the number of the average DNS server and 10 times faster than other DNS caching servers. Jungck refers to this as the ‘brawn’ of the technology. The ‘brains’ behind the solution are CloudShield’s, wire-speed, deep packet inspection (DPI) capability and patented DNS protection techniques, which provide granular packet visibility and examination. Because CloudShield’s uniquely designed solutions operate at multi-gigabit speed, DNS attacks are mitigated before problems are ever noticed.

In addition, e-commerce sales won’t be lost due to network downtime as there is no network reconfiguration required to install either of the products. CloudShield DNS Defender filters specified domains, ensures protocol compliance, limits protocol options and rate limits DNS requests, as well as caching and resolving queries at up to 800,000 queries / second. CloudShield SYN Defender filters out invalid queries when SYN attacks flood a Website with requests to connect.

CloudShield systems are currently deployed by some of the largest network service providers in North America, Europe and Asia.

Executive quote

“Worldwide, concerted DDoS attacks occur as many as 10,000 times per day against DNS servers. Our two Defender products ensure e-commerce revenue streams are protected against massive SYN and DNS attacks,” said Peder Jungck, CloudShield’s founder and CTO. “By enabling these protective solutions, e-commerce merchants can remain confident that consumers will encounter a positive user experience and companies can continue to make sales in this important selling season.”

Customer quote

“We’ve concluded that because of CloudShield’s query resolution speed, we can significantly reduce the number of servers in our server farm,” said the CTO for a leading DNS provider. “If we’re hit by a DDoS attack, we pay for the CloudShield solution in hours or days by keeping our systems, and more importantly our reputation on line; if we’re never attacked, it pays for itself in a year from savings on power, cooling and rack space.”

Pricing and availability

Both products are available immediately.

About the company

About CloudShield
CloudShield is a provider of multi-gigabit, multi-function, programmable, deep packet inspection platforms designed for large network operators. The company's unique capabilities allow content inspection, service control, and security applications to perform at true gigabit speeds on even small packet sizes, and enable entirely new classes of applications and revenue generating services. Through its application partners, CloudShield has helped deliver solutions to carriers in North America, Europe, and Asia as well as several important federal government customers. More information about CloudShield can be found at http://www.cloudshield.com

Contact details

Noah Dye
LEWIS PR for CloudShield
408 668 5727
cloudshield@lewispr.com

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