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Meanwhile, a firewall acts as policy enforcer to prevent unauthorized access to data. IPS devices, for example, block break-in attempts that cause data theft. IPS devices, firewalls and other security products are essential elements of a layered-defense strategy, but they are designed to solve security problems that are fundamentally different from dedicated DDoS detection and mitigation products.
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(Firewalls, Intrusion Detection/Protection Systems, Application Delivery Controllers / Load Balancers) According to Frost & Sullivan, DDoS attacks are “increasingly being utilized as a diversionary tactic for targeted persistent attacks.” Attackers are using DDoS tools to distract the network and security teams while simultaneously trying to inject advanced persistent threats such as malware into the network, with the goal of stealing IP and/or critical customer or financial information. These cyber attacks are popular because they difficult to defend against and often highly effective.
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Today’s sophisticated attackers are blending volumetric, state exhaustion and application-layer attacks against infrastructure devices all in a single, sustained attack. Application layer attacks have come to prevalence over the past three or four years and simple application layer flood attacks (HTTP GET flood etc.) have been some of the most common denial of service attacks seen in the wild. These are the deadliest kind of attacks as they can be very effective with as few as one attacking machine generating a low traffic rate (this makes these attacks very difficult to pro-actively detect and mitigate). Application Layer attacks target some aspect of an application or service at Layer-7.