REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- CoSine Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: COSN), a leading provider of managed, network-based IP Service Delivery Platforms for service providers, today announced the European commercial availability of DoSShield, the industry's first proactive prevention for DoS and Distributed DoS attacks. Based on IPNOS version 3.2, the operating system underlying the fully distributed and virtualised architecture of CoSine's IP Service Delivery Platform, DoSShield provides network-based protection against malicious DoS attacks on enterprise access routers, access links and servers.

"DoS attacks are rapidly becoming the most prevalent form of malicious attacks on enterprise and service provider network and their cost to business can be considerable, both in terms of revenue and the impact on corporate brands," said Steve Goggiano, CoSine's president and CEO. "The recent distributed DoS attack on the Internet's key DNS servers is testament to the serious threat these sorts of attacks pose. IPNOS 3.2 with DoSShield is a perfect example of how CoSine's flexible architecture can integrate new capabilities and technologies as market demand dictates."

A DoS attack is a malicious attempt to prevent the legitimate use of a network service, usually by disrupting an end-user's access router, flooding a network connection with false traffic or blocking access to a specific server or application resources. The impact to a carrier's enterprise customer from such a disruption can include a complete data traffic stoppage for an end-user network, disruption of mission-critical services (FTP, SAP, e-commerce), severely decreased productivity and increased OPEX in order to bring the network back up. There is also the incalculable loss that negative publicity brings. All of these effects result in a loss of revenues or increased cost to the enterprise customer. In 2001, a UC San Diego study detected over 12,800 DoS attacks on over 5,000 targets in a 3-week period whilst a CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security survey found that respondents lost an average of $287,000 due to DoS attacks.

DoSShield isolates and mitigates the effects of DoS attacks to both the service provider and its enterprise customers. By enabling this capability at the edge of the service provider network, CoSine's DoSShield is in a unique position to protect the enterprise customer's router, on-site servers and the access link itself. Conventional edge routers can only provide partial rate limiting and filtering capabilities for a router serving hundreds of customers, whereas CoSine's distributed and virtualised architecture allows DoSShield to provide proactive per-customer protection for an enterprise customer's access link, router and servers dramatically extending protection to the enterprise and further enhancing the appeal of networked-based service offerings.

CoSine Communications Inc.