UX World, AWS, and DNS Security

We read about the spammer vs. antispam attack in the NY Times today and immediately thought of our friends over at UX World. Nick, one of the founders, was already on top of it and was nice enough to give us his take on the issue:

dnsfly by UX WORLD maintains IP Persistence for EC2 users and improves Cloud Security by Protecting DNS against Attack

The New York Times reported one of the largest Internet attacks yesterday in an article, “Firm is Accused of Sending Spam, and Fight Jams Internet”:

“In the past, blacklisted sites have retaliated against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they flood Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until its servers become unreachable. But in recent weeks, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet’s core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or DNS.”

One of the primary concerns of businesses using the “Cloud” is security.
The most pressing security concern is DNS security. DNS is at the core of the network and administrators may not realize the degree of vulnerability. For many companies, IT professionals may believe that they have left DNS management in good hands by outsourcing to managed service providers.  However, it may be unclear exactly how a given managed service provider is protecting DNS from attack: the degree and type of protection available to their DNS servers may be completely opaque.
It’s important to mitigate risk as much as possible.  A DNS appliance such as dnsfly is an easily implementable and cost effective way of protecting DNS from attacks. dnsfly can be deployed in minutes from Amazon’s AWS Marketplace for example, and used with IaaS managed infrastructure. dnsfly is designed for security, is DNSSEC compliant, is built with a hardened Linux operating system stripped of unnecessary ports and services, operates in a “jailed” environment, and benefits from frequent updates as vulnerabilities are discovered. dnsfly implements GeoDNS through Amazon Web Services allows for load balancing and enhanced availability and seamless integration through constantly updated API’s.

About UX WORLD
UX WORLD was founded by experts in DNS and focuses on DNS security and administration.  UX WORLD developed dnsfly, a DNS/DHCP appliance offered as a virtual appliance and physical appliance. The OVA distribution is compatible with VMware ESXi, CA AppLogic, Xen, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is currently available for purchase on Amazon’s Amazon Web Services Marketplace and from UX WORLD.  UX WORLD has successfully completed large-scale deployments of dnsfly to customers such as Air France and Quantum Aviation.  For additional information visit uxworld.com, email nick@uxworld.com, or call Nick Desai at 212-786-2383.

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