Tata Communications designs defence against cyber attacks

Tata Communications has designed a 'detection and mitigation' service to ward off cyber attacks on critical network infrastructure and business applications.

The system, called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), for detection and mitigation of cyber attacks has been deployed to protect the country's network infrastructure from sophisticated and methodical cyber attacks. DDoS makes a computer resource unavailable to its intended attackers.

Tata Communications' DDoS detection and mitigation security service provides real-time application-layer analysis of all IP traffic traversing the company's global IP backbone.

By monitoring and analysing customer traffic in real time and on a 24x7x365 basis, Tata Communications provides proactive notification of actionable events to its customers, improving visibility into the security and availability of their networks and applications.

''Tata Communications' security backbone filters all traffic to trace any possible attack before customer resources are impacted, leading to optimum utilisation of bandwidth,'' the company said in a statement.

The system enables analysts to quickly determine the root cause of changes in traffic, be it a violation of usage policy, a worm outbreak, or a DDoS attack by millions of computers from different parts of the world, it said.

According to officials at the Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-in), the watchdog that tracks hacking of government networks, ''almost daily attacks'' are being mounted on Indian government and private computer networks. There are already close to 50,000 malicious BOTS in India at present and millions more around the globe.

''Since computer networks, both in India and internationally, are controlled from outside - "a sort of cyberspace fifth column" - there is a danger that at an appointed time, the external controllers of BOTNETS will command the infected networks of "zombie" computers to potentially create a national security emergency by flooding traffic at key network and application infrastructure,'' the release pointed out.

''Research from our global network of security partners show 90 per cent of security vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable,'' the release quoted Col AJ Vijayakumar, CISSP and head of Tata Communications' Security Services Operations Centre (SOC) in Chennai as saying. The centre manages Tata Communications' defence-in-depth managed security services suite.

''The number of disclosed critical computer vulnerabilities grew 28 per cent in 2007 and only half of these are addressed by traditional software patching. What is driving this trend is the increasing complexity of IT, the growth of web applications and the difficulty and cost of retaining capable security staff,'' he added.

''Achieving an effective state of information security goes far beyond any one security technology,'' said John Landau, senior vice president, Managed Solutions, Tata Communications.

''The real work lies in enforcing security policies with repeatable processes, having a global view of evolving security threats and correlating tremendous volumes of information to swiftly detect and mitigate security events. A defense-in-depth strategy deploys resources in appropriate roles and in mutually supportive positions,'' the release added.