Alcatel-Lucent, Arbor Networks Partner on DDOS Mitigation

Alcatel-Lucent is now offering a router with technology from Arbor Networks that defends against distributed denial-of-service attacks, the two companies said on Wednesday.

The companies have partnered to put Arbor’s Threat Management System (TMS), which filters out attack traffic, into Alcatel-Lucent’s 7750 model router. It’s the first time that Arbor has embedded the software into a router, as it sells stand-alone TMS appliances.

TMS will be integrated as a blade that goes into the service router, said Tom Bienkowski, director of product marketing for Arbor. Each blade can handle 5 gigabits per second of traffic and will fit inside the SR-7 and SR-12 versions of the 7750 router.

Companies large and small increasingly see DDOS attacks, which bombard websites with traffic intended to cause sites to go offline. The hacktivist group Anonymous has waged DDOS campaigns against many companies such as MasterCard and PayPal as punishment for policies they oppose.

With TMS, service providers using the 7750 will be able to filter out attack traffic at the “edge” of their networks as it comes in, Bienkowski said. If a service provider detects a DDOS attack coming into its network, the malicious traffic is rerouted to a regional “scrubbing” data center in order to sort out the legitimate traffic from attack traffic.

But that can be expensive, since some service providers may have to pay other service providers in order to send the traffic to their data center. Essentially, they would be paying to send attack traffic, Bienkowski said.

The new product also gives service providers a chance to make more money, along the lines of others services provided above and beyond mere connectivity, such as VPN (virtual private network), Bienkowski said. So far, 20 service providers are testing the system.

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