Vocus Communications Selects Arbor Networks

Vocus Communications Selects Arbor Networks
for Distributed Denial of Service Attack Identification and Mitigation

Vocus protects Australian and New Zealand customers by placing its defences offshore

Chelmsford, Mass., September 1, 2010 – Arbor Networks, Inc., a leading provider of network security and management solutions for converged carrier networks and next-generation data centres, announced today that Vocus Communications, a provider of wholesale Voice and IP Transit across Australia, NZ and the US, has selected Arbor’s Peakflow SP platform (“Peakflow SP”) for protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

“As a wholesale IP Transit provider, Vocus Communications is committed to delivering high performance, high availability services to our customers. Part of that commitment is deploying the best technology available in the market to secure our network. Arbor’s products are unique in their ability to deliver a combination of real-time attack identification, mitigation and reporting. This enables Vocus to not only secure our infrastructure, but offer “Clean Internet” services to service providers across Australia and New Zealand,” said James Spenceley, Vocus Communications chief executive officer.

The Arbor Peakflow SP platform is the de facto standard for IP flow-based network security, visibility and analysis. The vast majority of the world’s leading service providers rely on Arbor’s Peakflow SP to proactively fend off malicious threats, thwart distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and strengthen the quality of their service. In addition to being their security platform of choice, Peakflow SP enables these organisations to reduce cost by improving IPv4 and IPv6 traffic engineering and operational efficiencies.

Peakflow SP is tightly integrated with Arbor’s Threat Management System (TMS) that automatically detects and surgically removes only attack traffic while maintaining legitimate business traffic. Without the ability to mitigate the attack traffic close to the ingress point of the network, network operators are vulnerable to collateral network damage which could affect other customers.

“Being an Island nation, we are very dependent upon our international submarine cables for connectivity to the rest of the world. By deploying Peakflow TMS at their US Point of Presence (POP), Vocus can prevent these links from becoming congested under DDoS attack while ensuring network availability to their customers” said Nick Race, Arbor Networks country manager in Australia and New Zealand. “Vocus has also joined Arbor’s Fingerprint Sharing Alliance, a community of global service providers who are collaborating to stop cyber attacks. The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance isn’t just unique; it’s a practical and valuable platform for information sharing and problem solving.”

Arbor Fingerprint Sharing Alliance (FSA)
Arbor’s Fingerprint Sharing Alliance (FSA) is a first-of-its-kind industry initiative aimed at helping service providers share Internet attack information automatically. The goal of the FSA is to streamline the resolution of business vulnerabilities across ISPs by providing an extensible framework for the identification, investigation and remediation of anomalies that cross networks. This mechanism provides the ability to share anomaly-specific information across administrative boundaries in real-time, and provides a common vocabulary for describing network anomalies and resolving threats across multiple types of relationships: customer, transit, peering, etc. This massive aggregation of data and the analysis of it by Arbor’s world-renowned security researchers are of no use to providers unless there is a means for them to share it and act on it. That is what the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance is all about: actionable intelligence.

On August 31, 2010, Arbor Networks was acquired by Tektronix Communications, a Danaher operating company. Arbor joins Danaher’s portfolio of Communications and Enterprise Group companies, which includes Tektronix Communications, Fluke Networks and Visual Network Systems. The group forms one of the industry’s strongest and most comprehensive portfolios of products and solutions to deploy, measure, monitor and secure communications and enterprise networks.

ENDS