Fortinet − a world leader in high-performance network security – has expanded its distributed denial of service (DDoS) product family with four new appliances for data centre managers and system architects at mid- to large-sized enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs).
The new FortiDDoS-400B, FortiDDoS-800B, FortiDDoS-1000B and FortiDDoS-2000B appliances are designed to detect and help protect against today’s most damaging and sophisticated DDoS attacks and feature an innovative 100 percent behaviour-based DDoS attack mitigation engine.
Combined with a new, single-path custom ASIC that both detects and mitigates DDoS attacks, FortiDDoS is able to detect more types of attacks and performs up to 10X faster than other competing DDoS mitigation appliances.
The new behaviour-based attack mitigation engine enables FortiDDoS to identify and mitigate current and future threats based on patterns and intent rather than content. Because these appliances don’t require signatures, they are able to better protect against zero-day attacks by dynamically monitoring trends versus waiting for a signature file to be updated.
A very short blocking period achieved using high-performance ASICs allows the appliance to continuously re-evaluate attacks. This reduces the impact of false positives if traffic patterns return to normal. Competing appliances take much longer to detect attacks and block for much longer periods of time leading to higher false positive.
“We’ve dramatically improved the way we identify DDoS attack types since we released our first appliances in 2012. The adaptive, behaviour-based attack monitoring introduced in today’s models automatically identifies any type of DDoS attack, including zero-days, and almost immediately takes action to mitigate it,” says John Maddison, VP of marketing for Fortinet.
“What’s more, we’re able to offer this class-leading performance at less than half the cost of our closest competitors.”
Fortinet is the only company to use a 100 percent custom ASIC approach to its DDoS products, which eliminates the overhead with CPU or CPU/ASIC hybrid systems. The second-generation FortiASIC-TP2 traffic processor provides both detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in a single processor that handles all layer 3, 4 and 7 traffic types.
Competitors use different combinations of processors where some traffic is assigned to an ASIC, some to the CPU or on some models, everything goes to the CPU itself, which leads to bottlenecks and reduced overall system performance.
“Despite the best efforts by ISPs to defend against DDoS threats, residual and application layer attacks are still able to bring down services in an Internet data centre,” says Hemant Jain, vice president of engineering for Fortinet. “Fortinet now provides DDoS attack mitigation with up to 24Gbps of full duplex throughput in the data centre to ensure that critical services are always available.”
FortiDDoS builds a baseline of normal application activity and then monitors traffic against it. Should an attack begin, FortiDDoS would see this as an anomaly and then immediately take action to mitigate it. Users are protected from known attacks and from unknown zero-day attacks, as FortiDDoS does not need to wait for a signature file to be updated.
FortiDDoS also handles attack mitigation differently than other hardware DDoS attack mitigation appliances. FortiDDoS uses a surgical bi-directional approach by monitoring normal inbound and outbound traffic and then using a reputation scoring system, rates IP addresses that are “good” and others that are participating in the attack.
The good traffic is allowed to proceed, but the offending IP addresses are temporarily blocked. If they’re determined to be a real threat after repeated re-evaluation, they are blocked for a much longer period of time.
Product specifications:
* The FortiDDoS-400B features 4Gbps full-duplex throughput, 16 1Gbps RJ-45 copper and SFP ports for LAN and WAN connectivity with support for up to 1-million simultaneous connections;
* The FortiDDoS-800B features 8Gbps full-duplex throughput, 16 1Gbps RJ-45 copper and SFP ports for LAN and WAN connectivity with support for up to 2-million simultaneous connections;
* The FortiDDoS-1000B features 12Gbps full-duplex throughput, 16 10Gbps SPF+ slots for LAN and WAN connectivity with support for up to 3-million simultaneous connections; and
* The FortiDDoS-2000B features 24Gbps full-duplex throughput, 16 10Gbps SPF+ slots and 4 10Gbps SFP+ bypass ports for LAN and WAN connectivity with support for up to 6-million simultaneous connections.
