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According to the tech research firm Gartner, more than 25 billion things will be connected to the Internet by 2020. This massive Internet of Things presents amazing opportunities for innovation in how we go about every area of our lives, from the ability to control a home thermostat from thousands of miles away to trading large shares of stock with the effortless swipe of a screen. This unprecedented amount of connectivity also means we need to amp up our online security measures in real ways. With billions of devices now transporting data, it’s essential that companies protect their assets and their customers with stringent security measures.

 

The number one area of network infiltration happens at the server level through these 4 main types of attacks: zero-day, cache poisoning, denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. While these hacks can be mitigated through various precautions, a company’s best line of defense is in implementing low latency, high-frequency packet capture solutions to increase security not only on the perimeter, but at the top of every rack or within every server.

 

neuschwanstein-castle-467116_1280Solarflare approaches network security in a realistic way by assuming that attacks will happen- it’s a real side effect of the times in which we live. But instead of letting an intruder have access to the entire castle just because they crossed the moat, Solarflare’s packet capture approach adds a new layer of protection at the server level. Think of it as a series of safes, locking your valuables up separately to prevent unwelcome visitors from running off with all the crown jewels.

 

 

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The core of Solarflare’s DDoS attack mitigation consists of a high performance packet filter engine that uses a pseudo-microcode instruction set to configure the filter engine to selectively accept, reject or rate-limit packets based on packet headers and packet contents. The microcode used for filtering is under user control, making the filtering behavior highly configurable. This packet capture approach allows “bad” traffic to be detected very early in the network stack, so DDoS attacks can be absorbed without degradation of “good” traffic. The filter engine provides the ability to efficiently block or rate limit packets based on their contents, as well as request level deep packet inspection. For example, HTTP requests can be inspected and connections aborted dependent on the contents of the HTTP headers.

 

In the face of DDoS attacks,  servers enabled with the SolarSecure Filter Engine were found to be 3 to 4 times more effective at packet filtering than iptables. It’s pretty clear that the future of network security is in this multi-layered packet capture approach.