Responding to an increase in threats, as well as demands from its customers, MCI Inc. will announce a new service this week to protect its managed services customers from DDoS attacks, according to an MCI executive.
The MCI news is the latest move by the company to increase its security posture following its January purchase of security services company NetSec Inc.
The announcement came just days after competitor AT&T Corp. said it was adding new anti-spam and anti-spyware protection to its portfolio of managed security services.
The MCI distributed-denial- of-service protection service, dubbed WAN Defense, will replace a DDoS mitigation offering that relied on internally developed tools to stop DDoS attacks after they began, said Chris Sharp, vice president of security architecture at NetSec, in Herndon, Va.
WAN Defense will be proactive rather than reactive, routing traffic to an MCI customer through three “scrubbing centers” where malicious traffic will be stripped out and legitimate traffic forwarded along to the customer network, Sharp said. The service combines technology from network anomaly detection company Arbor Networks Inc. with DDoS mitigation technology from Cisco Systems Inc.s Riverhead Guard and Protector, Sharp said.
The service costs between $3,500 per month for DDoS mitigation on a 500MB network connection and $14,250 per month for a 3G-bps network connection. The protection service costs between $200 per month for companies with a T-1 line and $69,000 per month for companies with a high-capacity OC-48 network connection, Sharp said.
AT&T, meanwhile, last week rolled out its Secure E-mail Gateway Service, a managed spam filtering, virus blocking and content management service for inbound and outbound e-mail messages.
ISPs boost security services
Managed security services are becoming a big business—and a profit center—for ISPs of all stripes. Heres a look at some of the security offerings from major providers:
- AT&T Managed IDS (intrusion detection system), managed firewall and token authentication services, Internet Protect, Secure E-mail Gateway Service
- MCI Managed IPS (intrusion protection system), managed firewall, vulnerability scanning, anti-virus, anti-spam, DDoS protection
- Sprint Corp. Managed firewall, IDS, authentication, Web filtering, VPN and e-mail protection services
- Cybertrust Inc. Secure authentication, identity management and data center security services
