MCI offers free security
In an effort to help the Net community combat hackers, MCI said today it is making its new security software available for free.
InternetMCI Security developed DoS (denial of service) Tracker more than a year ago in response to customers' needs for tools to combat the rising and increasingly aggressive nature of hacker attacks.
Denial of service attacks occur when someone programs a computer to continuously deliver phony authentication messages to the targeted server, keeping it constantly busy and locking out legitimate users.
"Before DoS Tracker, the process of tracing an attack to its source took a trained engineer between 25 and 35 minutes," said Dale Drew, senior manager of InternetMCI Security. "With DoS Tracker, a complete trace takes 2 ? to 3 minutes, allowing ISPs to quickly trace attacks that usually don't last more than 15 minutes."
DoS Tracker works against SYN, ICMP Flood, Bandwidth Saturation, and Concentrated Source, and has recently been modified to detect a new attack called Smurf.
The DoS Tracker software can be downloaded from MCI's Web site.