Amid News of Denial of Service Attack Against Microsoft, Asta Networks Offers Telling Industry Insights; Industry Leader is Well Versed in the Dangers of Denial of Service Attacks.

Business/High Tech Editors

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 25, 2001

Amid the news released earlier today that the computer systems of Microsoft were the victim of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, one company -- Asta Networks -- is reporting on the widespread vulnerability of the Internet to such attacks.

For more than a year, the Seattle-based Internet reliability firm has been aggressively engaged in the design and deployment of a new generation of technology that successfully defends against such an attack. Just last week, Asta Networks announced the successful deployment of its router-based technology in the Internet2(R) Abilene backbone where it automatically detected DoS attacks moments after they began.

"We have always known that it was not a matter of if another attack would be launched, it was a matter of when the next big attack would occur," said Joe Devich, Asta Networks CEO. "Asta Networks was founded last year to increase the security and reliability of the Internet, with our first order of business to solve this intensifying problem of DoS attacks."

It was during February 2000 that the general Internet community first became aware of the devastating potential of DoS attacks when industry giants including Yahoo!, CNN.com, eBay, and others found all access to their sites had been overwhelmed by a DoS attack.

"According to Microsoft, today's outage was the result of a DoS attack," said Dr. Tom Anderson, Asta Networks chief technology officer. "What many people do not realize is how easy it is to launch such an attack. This is not necessarily the work of a sophisticated hacker."

DoS attacks paralyze network and Web site operations by flooding them with useless traffic, blocking customer access, and even causing entire networks to crash. The information that is sent to the target Web site looks like normal traffic and as such, is extremely difficult to detect until something goes wrong.

Until recently, attempts at countering the DoS threat focused on firewall technology which had an unfortunate effect of shutting down all traffic -- good and bad -- once an attack was detected. Through the development work of Asta Networks, the technology exists to monitor these attacks without having a negative impact on the overall network performance. The Asta Networks technology keeps the good traffic flowing while preventing damaging traffic from getting through.

About Asta Networks

Asta Networks is a Seattle-based company creating network infrastructure technology that works with existing hardware and software to improve the reliability of the Internet. The company's initial focus is solving the intensifying problem of DoS attacks. By reducing the impact of DoS attacks and other network problems, Asta Networks will enable organizations to confidently depend on the Internet for their critical communications and business transactions. For more information, visit www.astanetworks.com.