Did you know that Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are one of the fastest ways for cybercriminals to bring down a digital business? Scan the news for “DDoS attack,” and you’ll see hundreds of examples, dozens every month, affecting even the world’s largest companies. And the grim reality: DDoS attacks are only getting more frequent and more powerful, as highlighted in Corero’s latest Threat Intelligence Report.
Fortunately, DDoS protection is evolving, too. Today, with the latest release of Corero’s SmartWall Threat Defense Director (TDD) for Juniper Networks® routers, large network operators can benefit from one of the industry’s most effective and scalable DDoS protection solutions—directly integrated with the network infrastructure they already have in place and scaling anywhere from 50 Gbps to 40 Tbps.
It’s the latest example of how we bring the Juniper Connected Security vision to life. And, with newly introduced support for Juniper PTX Series routers and new DDoS threats, the latest TDD software delivers more robust protection than ever.
Introducing SmartWall Threat Defense Director 11.5
Juniper believes that the IP network should play a central role in protecting users, applications and infrastructure, providing the first line of defense against cyber attacks. That’s why, since 2017, we’ve partnered with Corero, integrating real-time, automatic, DDoS protection directly into Juniper routers to stop attacks right at the network edge. Today, we’re introducing the latest release, TDD 11.5, with new features that include:
- New support for Juniper PTX Series: Juniper’s Connected Security vision focuses on extending security to every point of connection. Through deployments in some of the world’s biggest networks, we’ve shown that DDoS protection integrated with the network infrastructure, is one of the most effective ways to do it. Now, we’re extending the same proven solution beyond the MX Series to Juniper PTX Series, which is often used in massive core and backbone networks. By embedding DDoS protection in PTX Series platforms, customers can beef up defenses for critical content cache servers and peering sites for data center interconnect—growing targets for cyber attacks.
- Automatic protection from DDoS subnet attacks: Traditionally, DDoS solutions have been designed to mitigate attacks that just target single destination IP addresses. It should come as no surprise then that cybercriminals have adopted new techniques to help evade that mitigation. These “carpet bombing” DDoS attacks target multiple destination IPs at once, and even entire subnets, making it virtually impossible for traditional DDoS solutions to distinguish them from legitimate traffic—especially those which rely on manual analysis. The newly enhanced Juniper and Corero TDD solution monitors at both the IP and subnet level, analyzing all destination IPs concurrently, automatically identifying single and multi-destination attacks and stopping them before they take down customer assets.
- Increased visibility with enhanced service portal: TDD makes it easy for providers to monetize security investments by offering DDoS protection as a managed service. They can track all mitigations or filter events by tenant or protection service level. And, with TDD 11.5, each tenant gets enhanced visibility into the details of the attacks they are protected from. For example, with the IP intelligence add-on, they can quickly identify which country and even which partner network (via Autonomous System Number) is the source of the threat. In addition, TDD gives mobile operators real-time visibility into traffic using the GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP).
Meeting the Growing DDoS Challenge
DDoS attacks have become the go-to strategy for cybercriminals seeking to take down digital targets—and they’re only growing in frequency, magnitude and sophistication. 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) rollouts exacerbate the problem, exponentially increasing the number of connected endpoints that can be exploited to launch attacks—many of which don’t even have basic security to prevent them being compromised. It’s a vast and growing threat. But for service providers, cloud providers and other large network operators, most DDoS products offer only partial solutions.
Conventional DDoS scrubbing solutions are typically slow, requiring attack traffic to be redirected, across internal networks, and undergo manual interventions. With large organizations averaging costs of $300,000 for each hour of downtime, every lost minute counts. And most DDoS attacks today take less than 10 minutes from start to finish. However, many organizations still rely on basic traffic thresholds to detect threats, which makes it a real struggle to distinguish attacks from spikes in legitimate customer traffic. Such false positives/negatives can be as damaging as a successful attack.
Another significant challenge for large network operators, is that most DDoS solutions can’t cost-effectively scale with their needs. As a result, many organizations only deploy DDoS protection for a small fraction of their total bandwidth, and hope that ends up being enough. Considering that AWS was hit with a 2.3-Tbps DDoS attack last year, that’s an increasingly risky bet.
Extending Connected Security Everywhere
At Juniper, we believe in safeguarding users, applications and infrastructures by extending security to every point of connection. By embedding advanced DDoS protection directly into the IP infrastructure, we help organizations automatically protect critical business traffic and block attacks in real time. And our customers around the globe can confirm just how effective this approach is.
With the Juniper and Corero solution, GARR operates more efficiently, saving approximately 20% of staff time dedicated to network security. MCM Telecom now automatically mitigates 98% of DDoS attacks—and projects the as-a-service offering will increase its enterprise sales by 27%.
Plusnet has completely automated the detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks. Linode offers DDoS mitigation-as-a-service and gains a competitive advantage with Juniper and Corero joint solution.
It’s a unique approach to security—one that draws on the best of Juniper and our partner, Corero. Together, we’ve created DDoS protection that’s invisible to users, efficient for operators and highly effective at stopping volumetric attacks within sub 10 to 20 seconds.
Want to give it a try? Sign up now and get a 30-day free trial! To learn more, join us for an upcoming webinar on November 9th for a technical deep dive and see the live demo in action.
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