Arbor expands & upgrades Atlas threat monitoring network

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 04:10

IT Industry - Market

Arbor Networks has upgraded Atlas, its real time Internet threat reporting system, with additional functionality and has trebled the number of participating ISPs from 30 to 100.

Arbor Networks' Active Threat Level Analysis System (Atlas) is claimed to be the world's first globally scoped threat analysis network. It is based on Arbor Networks Peakflow AP anomaly detection platform, installed in 70 percent of the world's service provider networks and monitoring 80 percent of global Internet traffic. according to Arbor.

ATLAS 1.0, launched in 2008 with 30 ISPs used their installed Peakflow platforms to feed information back to Arbor on the threats that were hitting their networks. Arbor aggregates and anonymises this information and feeds it back to the ISPs to assist in network management and threat mitigation. It also makes a subset of the information publicly available via a the Atlas Portal (http://atlas.arbor.net/).

For example, it showed that for the 24 hours to 15:00 AEST, 09 March Microsoft SQL Server version buffer overflow attempts were by far the largest attack vector accounting for almost 60 percent of the total. The second largest Microsoft Windows RPC Messenger Service pop-up spam, accounted for just 8.5 percent.

The enhanced version, Atlas 2.0, looks beyond security-related events, tracking real-time global Internet traffic, routing and application information. Rather than simply enabling ISPs to better protect their networks, Arbor says this additional information will "arm service providers to deliver new, secure, revenue-generating services."

Arbor claims to have "improved and extended [Atlas'] ability to gather real-time business intelligence data designed to help service provider customers understand not just the malicious traffic traversing their networks but the impact of global Internet events (ie traffic floods, application trends) on their business," and as a result, Arbor says it can provide "comprehensive visibility that improves business decisions about peering relationships, capacity planning, markets, services and network management."

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