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DDoS Mitigation Technology gains Industry Recognition

Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), the deliberate attempt to sabotage a Web application for a variety of different motives, has traditionally occupied the lower reaches of the security professional's priority list. In a world of growing indiscriminate threats to the security of the corporate network appearing on a daily basis, becoming the next target of a DDoS attack is often regarded as an acceptable risk by many organisations.

Webscreen named Best Information Security product.

All the more surprising then that at this year's British Computer Society Awards in London the prize for the best Information Security product went to Webscreen Systems a specialist DDoS mitigation technology development house. Perhaps this suggests that the BCS believes that it is time that more companies started to take DDoS seriously. The BCS is a widely respected independent industry body for IT professionals with over 60,000 members in 100 different countries and its awards are a central element of the BCS professionalism programme. As such BSC's opinions carry considerable weight across the whole of the IT sector.

DDoS on increase

DDoS first started to become a weapon of choice for the professional e-criminal around 2001 with some high profile Web sites, including Yahoo and Amazon, being taken off line in dramatic style. Since that time the number of incidences has grown year on year with now an estimated 5000 attacks every day in the US alone. In most cases the motivation is financial, with target companies frequently agreeing to pay substantial blackmail demands in return for switching off the attack, as the lesser of two evils. E-commerce based companies, particularly online retailers or gaming organisations can process millions of transactions every day and any downtime can be costly both in terms of lost revenue and corporate reputation.

DDoS brings Country to a halt

In 2007 DDoS attacks took on a more political dimension moving from being purely motivated by financial gain to being a weapon of choice for the cyber-terrorist community. Estonia became the first country to be targeted, allegedly by its close neighbour Russia, during an attack that brought down many of the country's Government Web sites. Since then the Internet has been awash with suggestions that the West could be facing a cyber-jihad from Muslim fundamentalists if steps are not taken to better protect the Internet.

Greater focus on DDoS in the future

Against this background and coupled with the year on year growth of an ecommerce sector, online shopping reached around 40% of the total pre-Christmas spend in 2007, it is perhaps easier to understand the reason why the BCS would single out Webscreen from the usual array of anti-virus, firewall or spam filtering products that are usually selected for the best security product accolades. Whatever the reasons behind the BCS decision it certainly seems to be part of a wider growing recognition across the network security sector. Webscreen has since been short-listed for two other major IT awards organised by Network Computing and SC Magazines, which should help to ensure that the issue of DDoS is brought into sharper focus for network security managers in the future.