Riverhead Unveils Anti-DDOS Stuff

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Riverhead Networks™, a leading provider of solutions that detect and block distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to preserve business continuity for ISPs, data centers and large enterprises, today announced its next-generation product family that delivers the industry’s highest-performance solutions for defending against the most powerful DDoS attacks.

Two new products — the Riverhead Guard™ XT and the Riverhead Detector™ XT — deliver multi-gigabit protection that defends the largest enterprises and service providers against the highest-volume, most sophisticated DDoS attacks. That performance, combined with new Zombie Killer technologies that identify and block hundreds of thousands of attackers, enable businesses to protect their mission-critical applications to maintain business continuity.

“For Rackspace, it is absolutely critical that we detect and block all types of DDoS attacks for our PrevenTier managed service customers,” says Paul Froutan, vice president of Engineering, Rackspace Managed Hosting. “Because attacks are constantly changing and evolving, we need a solution that allows us to keep pace and defeat the latest and largest-scale attacks. Riverhead Networks has consistently demonstrated its ability to anticipate attack trends and deliver solutions that address those trends. With the XT products in place, Rackspace is well-prepared to meet the growing DDoS challenge, which allows us to continue delivering the superior service for which we are known.”

Attacks on the Rise

DDoS attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity. A recent survey by the Computer Security Institute (CSI) and the FBI found that DDoS attacks were the second most common cyber attack — and the only one to increase — in 2003.

“Hackers are constantly modifying their attacks to evade or overwhelm defenses and do the most damage,” says Eric Ogren, senior analyst at Yankee Group. “As a result, businesses are ill-equipped to deal with these evolving attacks using traditional defenses of firewalls, routers and intrusion detection systems. What they need are intelligent, purpose-built network integrity solutions that can detect today’s most advanced DDoS attacks, identify the malicious traffic, and block those packets while allowing legitimate transactions to pass. The Riverhead XT products deliver those capabilities, offering the performance that large enterprises and service providers need to protect their infrastructures.”

Highest Performance DDoS Protection

The Riverhead products provide complete detection and mitigation capabilities. When a DDoS attack is launched, the Riverhead Detector XT, which constantly monitors traffic flows, recognizes the threat and immediately alerts the Riverhead Guard XT. The Guard XT, deployed off upstream routers or switches, then begins diverting traffic addressed to the target to apply a series of patent-pending technologies and algorithms based on Riverhead’s unique Multi-Verification Processä (MVP) architecture to identify and remove malicious packet flows while allowing legitimate transactions to pass.

The XT products feature high-performance hardware that can process Gigabit attacks at full line speeds with minimal latency, ensuring uncompromised business operations even while under severe attack conditions. The XT products also support a unique multi-device deployment that provides incremental capacity scaling for attack protection in excess of 10 gigabits per second.

Blocking Zombie Attackers

Riverhead’s Zombie Killer technologies deliver another first: the ability to identify and block more than 100,000 zombie attackers, defeating one of the most prevalent and difficult-to-stop DDoS attack sources. In a multi-device deployment, the XT products can detect and block hundreds of thousands of individual zombies, delivering unparalleled levels of protection against the largest botnet attacks.

Monitoring and Reporting

The Riverhead XT products also feature the latest MVP/OS software, version 3.0, which adds new monitoring and reporting capabilities that provide simple, robust operational management, as well as standards-based integration into existing network management environments (see the “Riverhead Networks Delivers New Management, Monitoring and Reporting Capabilities for DDoS Attack Detection & Mitigation” press release dated Jan. 26, 2004).

Riverhead Networks Inc.