Radware's Attack Mitigation System Protects Online Businesses Against Encrypted DoS & DDoS Attacks

MAHWAH, New Jersey, June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

For businesses that depend on secure Internet transactions, attacks to their Web services over Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol can knock servers offline resulting in lost revenue and decreased consumer trust. For many of these businesses -- such as financial institutions, government agencies, social networking firms, or online retailers -- this scenario is a nightmare currently playing out at the hands of cyber criminals worldwide.  To meet this growing cyber security concern, Radware^® (NASDAQ: RDWR), a leading provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, today announced its Attack Mitigation System (AMS) is the first solution of its kind that detects and mitigates denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that are SSL encrypted.  

Encrypted SSL-based transactions have become an essential component of online businesses that aspire to protect the privacy of their online users, driving increased use of the encryption protocol.  Decryption of encrypted data consumes more CPU resources than processing of a clear text.  Thus, encrypted application DoS & DDoS attacks amplify the impact even at relatively low rates of requests per second.  Cyber criminals and hackers are taking advantage of this and have been targeting online organizations with encrypted application DDoS attacks resulting in significant consumption of servers' CPU resources that either slow down or shut down services.  

"Recently, we have seen some powerful DoS and DDoS attacks that took advantage of the encrypted SSL traffic, targeting firms that depend on secured online transactions such as financial institutions, government agencies, social networking companies and others. Any organization that relies on SSL-based traffic without a proper decryption engine working in synch with an attack mitigation solution is exposing itself to great risk," said Avi Chesla, chief technology officer, Radware.

"Radware's AMS is the only real solution for SSL-based encrypted DoS/DDoS attacks.  With its anti-DDoS tools and advanced research, Radware's AMS ensures online businesses have the most extensive protection to meet the challenges of sophisticated, multi-vulnerability attack campaigns that include encrypted attacks," Chesla said.

Today's anti-DoS security solutions do not effectively mitigate HTTP-encrypted DoS and DDoS attacks. Through patent-pending technology, Radware's AMS is the only network security solution with the ability to protect against high rate, SSL-based, Web-encrypted DoS and DDoS attacks, in both symmetric and asymmetrical network traffic environments that typify today's anti-DoS scrubbing and cleaning centers.  Radware's AMS does this by performing the following steps:

• Identify encrypted, SSL-based,  DoS or DDoS attack events,  
• Decrypt the traffic and perform a deep-packet inspection to filter out a specific pattern of requests or behaviors that are associated with DoS or DDoS attacks,
• Challenge users through encrypted HTTP challenge-response techniques to determine if the request comes from a legitimate user, or from an artificial one (e.g., a bot).

Performing these actions ensure highly accurate attack mitigation, even in cases where the attack traffic integrates well into legitimate forms of applications and user behaviors.

Research shows that the encrypted DoS and DDoS attack is an emerging category of threat that today's anti-DoS mitigation tools cannot effectively mitigate. According to Radware's "2011 Global Network and Application Security Report", the company's Emergency Response Team has been tracking SSL DoS tools since late 2011 and has seen these tools grow in use and in sophistication.  

Radware's AMS is a real-time network and application cyber attack mitigation solution and the first solution with the capability to effectively mitigate SSL-based encrypted DoS and DDoS attacks. Through a powerful and scalable SSL processing engine providing SSL decryption and encryption capabilities matched with an advanced attack mitigator, Radware's AMS provides the industry's fullest set of protections against advanced cyber criminal techniques. This includes the "low & slow" threats in the network and application layers, as well as traffic anomaly attacks, connection-based misuse attacks, service cracking attacks, and application scan pre-attack probes. All of these attacks misuse network and application resources, and are components of today's sophisticated multi-vulnerability based attack campaigns.

For more information about SSL-based attacks, please read Radware's "2011 Global Application & Network Security Report" at http://www.radware.com/2011globalsecurityreport , and the Radware white paper on SSL mitigation at http://www.radware.com/workarea/showcontent.aspx?ID=1629030

Radware (NASDAQ: RDWR), is a global leader of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers. Its award-winning solutions portfolio delivers full resilience for business-critical applications, maximum IT efficiency, and complete business agility. Radware's solutions empower more than 10,000 enterprise and carrier customers worldwide to adapt to market challenges quickly, maintain business continuity and achieve maximum productivity while keeping costs down. For more information, please visit http://www.radware.com.

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This press release may contain statements concerning Radware's future prospects that are "forward-looking statements" under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.  These statements are based on current expectations and projections that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that future results will be achieved, and actual results could differ materially from forecasts and estimates.  These risks and uncertainties, as well as others, are discussed in greater detail in Radware's Annual Report on Form 20-F and Radware's other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made and Radware undertakes no commitment to revise or update any forward-looking statement in order to reflect events or circumstances after the date any such statement is made.  Radware's public filings are available from the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov or may be obtained on Radware's website at http://www.radware.com.

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SOURCE Radware Ltd