A breakthrough Denial of Service (DoS) Module for the Mu-4000 appliance was today announced by a pioneer in helping network operators and their vendors eliminate downtime through proactive service assurance, Mu Dynamics. This new Mu solution ensures service providers can proactively identify and eliminate service, application and network downtime caused by DoS and Distributed DoS attacks. The cost of downtime for a large service provider network is in excess of $100,000 per hour as showed by studies from Network Strategy Partners (NSP) and others.

Mu is enabled by this latest enhancement to deliver additional proactive service assurance options that result in a high return on investment for network operators and equipment vendors. Increasing end-user satisfaction and reducing customer churn, the ability to minimize service/network downtime accelerates the rollout of new and more robust services.

Mu’s new DoS Module for the Mu-4000 system helps service providers, equipment vendors and enterprise IT departments assess their exposure to poorly “hardened” networked services and systems that could become unreachable or unusable under unintentional or malicious DoS attacks. Including “Slammer Worm,” “SIP Invite/Register,” and “OSPF Hello” to model any networked application, product or service for known DoS and Distributed (DDoS) attacks, the Module is pre-loaded with more than 40 customizable Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) templates, also exposing the underlying software weaknesses or flaws that make networked applications subject to new forms of attack.

Users can customize, unlike other solutions, Layer 2-4 protocols and application-level services being targeted, as well as the packet payloads, and the attack rate and patterns. To ensure tests are as rigorous as possible, the DoS Module also automatically alters certain fields, such as source and destination ports and addresses, and performs other randomizations. While the system is concurrently stressed with D/DoS attacks, the solution uniquely allows any service of interest to be independently monitored. For example, while a server on a network is being attacked with a SIP Invite/Register Flood, the impact on an independent service like HTTP can be monitored. To produce repeatable, actionable results that can be used to remediate any weaknesses discovered, the automation elements throughout the Mu solution constantly monitors and records system behavior during the test.

The platform for the DoS Module, the Mu-4000 appliance, already leads the industry as the premiere choice for proactive service assurance with more than 100 deployments worldwide. The majority of these deployments are with global service providers and their strategic vendors.