Press Releases

5500 Prevents the Latest Identity Theft Cyber Crimes by Thwarting DNS Cache Poisoning Attempts

Westboro, MA, April 05, 2005 -

Top Layer Networks, the global leader for high performance intrusion prevention solutions, today announced that its award winning Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 can be used by service providers to proactively protect their customers from a new scam that uses “DNS Cache Poisoning” to cheat innocent Internet users. This new type of attack injects false information into DNS servers, which route traffic by matching domain names with IP addresses at Web hosts, allowing hackers to redirect users to bogus Web sites. These so called “pharming” attacks redirect requests from legitimate financial or online transaction sites to look-alike fraud sites.

In the past, phishing attacks usually consisted of official-looking emails from financial services institutions trying to link to what looks like an official site but is actually an unrelated Web site. Thousands of users unwittingly suffered identity theft by serving up their personal user and password information, which was then used to gain access to their personal banking and credit card accounts. Pharming, using DNS cache poisoning, is far more sophisticated and accomplishes the same thing by redirecting a legitimate Web site address to a scammer’s site. How this differs from traditional phishing is that a user attempting to directly access their online bank account may think they are on their bank’s Web site, but in reality have been secretly redirected to the scammer’s look-alike Web site and they are giving up personal information to a scammer. This is especially insidious, because the user is never required to click an email attachment or click on a link that was sent to them. In this case, the user is simply returning to a Web site they may have visited many times previously.

Peter Rendall, CEO and President of Top Layer Networks commented, “In recent weeks there have been a number of DNS poisoning attacks that have all the earmarks of a proof-of-concept that has the potential to be the next wave of phishing scams. Internet service providers have an obligation to protect their DNS infrastructures from these sophisticated attacks or face the reality of possible liability as users’ confidential information and financial accounts are compromised.”

Through its sophisticated built-in checks, the Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 is the best intrusion prevention solution for Service Providers to prevent poisoning of DNS servers. Through these powerful protection mechanisms, the IPS 5500 is able to prevent the customer from being redirected to a false site. Top Layer also provides this protection with the highest performing and most flexible deployment features available on the market today, making it the right solution for Service Providers.

About the Top Layer Attack Mitigator IPS 5500

The Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 family offers the strongest levels of Network IPS protection, performance and reliability on the market today. By improving upon the most powerful characteristics of stateful firewall technology and intrusion detection systems, Top Layer has developed the IPS 5500 in order to protect against attacks in real-time with minimal interruption of legitimate traffic. Top Layer executes high performance, non-disruptive deep packet inspection and analysis coupled with intelligent blocking of attacks through TopFire™ second-generation ASIC technology and TopInspect™ Deep Packet Inspection. To learn more about the Attack Mitigator IPS 5500, see our Web site at www.toplayer.com or contact sales@TopLayer.com or call 508-870-1300.

About Top Layer Networks, Inc.

Founded in 1997, Top Layer Networks develops network security solutions that enable enterprises worldwide to protect their infrastructure and critical online assets from cyber-threats. The Company’s patented, ASIC-based products are engineered to deliver accurate and reliable protection mechanisms while operating as robust in-line network security devices. Top Layer Networks is headquartered in Westboro, Massachusetts with sales and support presence in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

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