Test your cyber defenses with DIY DDoS

CANADIAN cybersecurity company DOSarrest has released a new service which allows organizations to test their systems’ resilience against distributed denial of service attacks.

The Cyber Attack Preparation Platform (CAPP) allows anyone to choose from a variety of options which specify the attack type, velocity, duration, and vector. The service is paid for according to the options chosen, and can be used by anyone – previously, only DOSarrest’s clients had access to this type of facility.

The attacking machines are distributed across the world and employ a variety of methods, thus accurately emulating an attack “in the wild.”

The company’s literature states that in some cases, larger hosts (such as cloud provider services like AWS or Google Cloud) simply scale up their hosted sites’ provisions in order to mitigate an attack: in short, when the going gets tough, the tough throw resources.

However, this style of mitigation can cost companies large sums of money if they are funding their cloud computing activities on the basis of pay-as-you-use.

Users of DOSarrest’s service can choose to pick specific attack types from a range of TCP attacks, plus a focussed range of attacks usually aimed at web services.

DOSarrest’s CTO, Jag Bains commented:

“It’s interesting to see how different systems react to attacks; CAPP not only shows you the traffic to the victim but also shows you the traffic response from the victim. A small attack [on] a target can actually produce a response back that’s 500 times larger […] This is the best tool I’ve seen to fine tune your cybersecurity defenses, if you fail you can make changes and launch the exact same attack again, to see if you can stop the attack.”

The company advises that attacks are chosen carefully as it is plainly possible to bring down an entire enterprise’s systems – by equal measures alarming and reassuring that large attacks can be emulated.

The company provides a handy pricing calculator by which interested parties can scope out what their testing might cost them: a ballpark of $US1,500 might be considered a bare minimum.

Of course, the cost of an attack by unknown actors will be much more, by some significant factor, and DOSarrest’s facility should hopefully go some way in mitigating the chances of such an attack being successful.

---

---

---