Verizon Business takes its denial of service defenses global

In the latest example of how services are moving to the Internet backbone, Verizon Business said Tuesday that it will extend its denial of service (DOS) attack defense to overseas.

Verizon Business, which had a service designed to prevent DOS attacks in the U.S., said it will roll out its offering to Canada, 14 European and eight Asia-Pacific countries. The move is designed to target multinational corporations and detection services start at $2,500 with mitigation services starting at $3,500.

The service proactively scans the Internet backbone for attacks and them mitigates them. Verizon Business' argument is that it's best to head off attacks at the network level so you can thwart them early and reroute traffic on the fly. In a DOS attack hackers try to overwhelm the network to thwart legitimate traffic. Ultimately, a network collapses.

Zooming out a bit though you can see where these services are headed. Verizon Business and AT&T offer security services at the backbone. Telecoms are also preparing to dabble with content delivery networks. Toss in piracy monitoring and you have one common theme: Services are moving to the network at a fairly rapid clip.

"Increasingly services are being offered at the backbone level," said Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, director of product management at Verizon Business. "[Backbone services) will take three to five years to mature."

Among the key points in our talk:

• DOS defense services are a reactive purchase. Nguyen-Duy noted that the typical customer contracts with Verizon Business after an attack. That's the general trend for all security purchases. Companies fail to take data breaches seriously--until they have one.
• Service level agreements are key with Internet backbone services and monitored via dashboards. The basic SLA with Verizon Business' DOS attack defenses promise that a customer will get an alert via multiple channels within 15 minutes of an attack. Fifteen minutes later mitigation will kick in. After 24 hours all change requests will be finished, said Nguyen-Duy. Here's what Verizon Business promises (it may be a good point of reference if you're shopping around):

• DOS attacks are still the most popular way to attack a network, but Nguyen-Duy did note that hackers are getting more creative.