Nominum Continues to Advance the State of the Art of the DNS with Newest Vantio Platform
Redwood City, CA Nominum announced today enhancements to its Vantio™ Intelligent DNS System that provides a faster, safer, and more useful Internet experience for more than 500 million fixed and mobile broadband users around the world. Building on the significant advantages of the Vantio Intelligent DNS System, Nominum is announcing several important new capabilities in this release:
* Event awareness to monitor the pulse of the Internet, enabling advanced DNS anomaly detection that automatically notifies network operators about unusual activity that could indicate an attack.
* Dynamic Priority Assignment (DPA) to dynamically change the priority assignment for policy evaluation and enforcement as policies are changed and real-time events occur. DPA also automatically allocates processors and memory to each service (caching DNS, network visibility, event awareness with advanced anomaly detection) so that the overall system performs predictably.
* Attack dampening algorithms to provide extraordinary resilience to DoS and DDoS events
* A new query randomization capability called “0×20” to considerably strengthen protections against DNS cache poisoning
“Nominum continues to advance the state of the art in DNS with new capabilities.” said Tom Tovar, CEO of Nominum. “Network operators get the strongest foundation for their DNS infrastructure, now with improved and proactive notification, support for multiple DNS services, and detailed data that they can use to make their networks safer and faster.”
Vantio’s new Event Awareness capabilities leverage DNS data to provide network operators a precise real time view of exactly what is happening on their networks. These powerful new capabilities use the extensive event and network-level information gathered by Vantio to closely monitor the DNS and immediately provide alerts to major changes. Malicious activity such as the onslaught of a DDoS attack can be recognized and signaled instantly. At the same time valuable or sensitive network resources like web sites or mail servers can be closely monitored, and when activity levels exceed or drop below normal operating ranges network staff can be proactively alerted to the change. This is not possible with an ordinary caching DNS server.
All of these new features are supported by Nominum’s latest algorithm called Dynamic Priority Assignment (DPA) which ensures that when multiple policies are applied to a DNS query they are dynamically evaluated and enforced in the most optimal order. As policies continuously change on the fly, DPA automatically updates the order in which policies are applied. DPA also lets network operators operate a caching DNS service, have network visibility, and gain event awareness, with advanced anomaly detection, all running simultaneously on the same hardware platform. Even with intensive data gathering and analysis operations the industry leading performance of Vantio is maintained.
Finally, an additional security defense from Nominum randomizes the case of domain names in DNS queries (ie www.nominum.com becomes wWW.NoMInuM.cOM) to make it harder for attackers to guess. Each character in a domain name that is randomized doubles the protection. This means a randomized domain name with 13 characters like wWW.NoMInuM.cOM is about 8,000 times harder to attack. A unique Vantio feature also eliminates the possibility a false positive would prevent access to a web site. Best of all this new capability works in conjunction with six other defenses built into Vantio software, maintaining Vantio’s position as the industry’s most secure caching DNS server.
“We are committed to making the Internet better through DNS” said Gopala Tumuluri, Chief Technical Officer. “Improved network visibility and event awareness with proactive alerts are just the beginning. We’ll continue to innovate so network operators can deliver the safe, secure and productive Internet experience that families and businesses need and demand.”
About Nominum
Nominum’s Intelligent DNS systems improve IP networks of all sizes globally; ensuring users always have a safe, secure and enjoyable Internet experience. Nominum in-network software solutions and SKYETM off-network hosted services form the foundation of the always-on Internet, protecting networks and the families and businesses that use them, and providing superior performance, and reliability. Nominum software and SKYE services now support more than 500 million fixed and mobile broadband users as well as enterprises, universities, and government agencies in every region. For more information visit www.nominum.com.
Nominum Continues to Advance the State of the Art of the DNS with Newest Vantio Platform
Redwood City, CA Nominum announced today enhancements to its Vantio™ Intelligent DNS System that provides a faster, safer, and more useful Internet experience for more than 500 million fixed and mobile broadband users around the world. Building on the significant advantages of the Vantio Intelligent DNS System, Nominum is announcing several important new capabilities in this release:
* Event awareness to monitor the pulse of the Internet, enabling advanced DNS anomaly detection that automatically notifies network operators about unusual activity that could indicate an attack.
* Dynamic Priority Assignment (DPA) to dynamically change the priority assignment for policy evaluation and enforcement as policies are changed and real-time events occur. DPA also automatically allocates processors and memory to each service (caching DNS, network visibility, event awareness with advanced anomaly detection) so that the overall system performs predictably.
* Attack dampening algorithms to provide extraordinary resilience to DoS and DDoS events
* A new query randomization capability called “0×20” to considerably strengthen protections against DNS cache poisoning
“Nominum continues to advance the state of the art in DNS with new capabilities.” said Tom Tovar, CEO of Nominum. “Network operators get the strongest foundation for their DNS infrastructure, now with improved and proactive notification, support for multiple DNS services, and detailed data that they can use to make their networks safer and faster.”
Vantio’s new Event Awareness capabilities leverage DNS data to provide network operators a precise real time view of exactly what is happening on their networks. These powerful new capabilities use the extensive event and network-level information gathered by Vantio to closely monitor the DNS and immediately provide alerts to major changes. Malicious activity such as the onslaught of a DDoS attack can be recognized and signaled instantly. At the same time valuable or sensitive network resources like web sites or mail servers can be closely monitored, and when activity levels exceed or drop below normal operating ranges network staff can be proactively alerted to the change. This is not possible with an ordinary caching DNS server.
All of these new features are supported by Nominum’s latest algorithm called Dynamic Priority Assignment (DPA) which ensures that when multiple policies are applied to a DNS query they are dynamically evaluated and enforced in the most optimal order. As policies continuously change on the fly, DPA automatically updates the order in which policies are applied. DPA also lets network operators operate a caching DNS service, have network visibility, and gain event awareness, with advanced anomaly detection, all running simultaneously on the same hardware platform. Even with intensive data gathering and analysis operations the industry leading performance of Vantio is maintained.
Finally, an additional security defense from Nominum randomizes the case of domain names in DNS queries (ie www.nominum.com becomes wWW.NoMInuM.cOM) to make it harder for attackers to guess. Each character in a domain name that is randomized doubles the protection. This means a randomized domain name with 13 characters like wWW.NoMInuM.cOM is about 8,000 times harder to attack. A unique Vantio feature also eliminates the possibility a false positive would prevent access to a web site. Best of all this new capability works in conjunction with six other defenses built into Vantio software, maintaining Vantio’s position as the industry’s most secure caching DNS server.
“We are committed to making the Internet better through DNS” said Gopala Tumuluri, Chief Technical Officer. “Improved network visibility and event awareness with proactive alerts are just the beginning. We’ll continue to innovate so network operators can deliver the safe, secure and productive Internet experience that families and businesses need and demand.”
About Nominum
Nominum’s Intelligent DNS systems improve IP networks of all sizes globally; ensuring users always have a safe, secure and enjoyable Internet experience. Nominum in-network software solutions and SKYETM off-network hosted services form the foundation of the always-on Internet, protecting networks and the families and businesses that use them, and providing superior performance, and reliability. Nominum software and SKYE services now support more than 500 million fixed and mobile broadband users as well as enterprises, universities, and government agencies in every region. For more information visit www.nominum.com.