Infoblox Defends the DNS of Service Providers

As one of the gateways for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, it is extremely important to protect the Domain Name System (DNS). The new improvements Infoblox (News - Alert) has made to its 4030 series appliance can block different types of threats to defend the DNS of service providers from possible DDoS attacks.

There are many reasons DDoS attacks are carried out; motivations can be political, financial, hacktivist, or even state-sanctioned. If successful, DDoS attacks can stop or dramatically reduce the performance of the network. Depending on the organization, this can results in disrupting subscriber services such as entertainment, gaming, or banking. But it also affects the brand’s reputation, which can have long term consequences.

Because cybercriminals are also now using DNS as a gateway to launch their attacks, Infoblox warns mobile, cable, broadband, and managed service providers of the danger if they are not adequately protected.

"Our service provider customers tell us the service degradation and outages caused by DDoS and other DNS attacks are a significant cause of subscriber dissatisfaction and churn. With these new enhancements, Infoblox can help increase visibility and control across all DNS infrastructure, easing operational costs, increasing manageability, and maintaining the best possible subscriber experience,." said Dilip Pillaipakam, vice president of service provider products at Infoblox. "

The Infoblox 4030 series appliance can intelligently detect DDoS attacks. When there is a query from legitimate source it lets it go through, but when it detects malicious DNS traffic, it drops them automatically so they won’t go through into the systems of the service providers. It can process millions of DNS queries per second with redundant RAID hard disks, hot-swappable power supplies, and hardware-based DNS attack detection and protection.

Some of the new features of the Infoblox 4030 series appliance are distributed NXDOMAIN attack protection, dual-engine DNS and enhanced DNS tunneling protection. Each of these attacks are designed to exploit vulnerabilities service providers might not be aware of.

While the threat landscape in the digital world is always changing to counteract the protection measure that are in place, having a deterrent in place always gives you a fighting chance against a very hostile environment.

The Akamai (News - Alert) Technologies Q1 2015 State of the Internet Security Report saw a record number of DDoS attacks across its networks. Compared to the last quarter, the jump was 35 percent and it more than doubled from the previous year to 116.5 percent. So attacks are not slowing down a bit.