Melior reports massive distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

Dallas, Texas, May 17, 2006 --- Another massive dDoS attack takes down hundreds of thousands of web sites, blogs, and mailservers.

Following aggressive counter-attacks - "reverse spam" - against Russian spammers by two year old Israel-based start-up Blue Security, a massive dDoS attack against the company and a subset of its 500,000 clients shut down hundreds of thousands of websites, blogs, and mailservers operated by TUCOWS, the Internet's largest domain registrar, as well as SixApart and TypePad, large blogging service providers, over the course of two weeks, from May 2nd through May 16th.

To make the attack successful, the attacker, a Russian spammer identified only by his handle 'PharmaMaster' by taking credit for the dDoS attacks, used the usual large network of hijacked 'zombie' machines, and exploited a known vulnerability in the Cisco operating system for its routers ("blackhole filtering" - a technique often misunderstood as a means to mitigate dDoS attacks). After the attacks lasted two weeks, Blue Security shut down on May 16th. At this time, the companies' web presence remains unreachable.

"This is yet another example - and one of many - to demonstrate the need for an additional layer of defense against network intrusions by Denial-of-Service attacks. If a working solution to successfully defend against these attacks were already widely available in the market, we would not read the repetitive news of how easily large numbers of web sites and Internet presences can be shut down even by small criminal enterprises," says Thomas J. Ackermann, Melior's CEO. "This is why we work so diligently to provide a new approach, with the ability to defend in real-time against 'zero-day' attacks, which does not rely on signature-based, addressable systems."

"Routers and firewalls are no match against the triangle approach of Virii (including Spyware, Worms, and other Malware to take over machines and create more zombies), Spam (the transport system for such malware, Phishing, and UCE itself), and the resulting distributed Denial-of-Service (dDoS) attacks. History has shown repeatedly 'counter-attacks' do not work, but rather escalate the situation, always resulting in the demise of the originator, as demonstrated -again- with the fate of Blue Security," he continues.

"We believe we are on the right track with our products of in-line, unaddressable and uncompromisable dDoS, eDoS, and vDoS devices. Our success in protecting the combined Spamhaus (PDF, Testimonials), SORBS, and Spews user base of 300,000,000 during the massive attacks launched by Russian spammers in 2003/2004 with our alpha and beta code versions, still remains the only such successful dDoS defense today."