Mu Dynamics Targets Proactive Service Assurance, Raises New Funding

Mu Dynamics (formerly Mu Security), a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, closed $10 million in Series C funding for its work proactive service assurance for network operators and their vendors. Studies from Network Strategy Partners (NSP) and others put the cost of downtime for a large service provider network in excess of $100,000 per hour. Mu Dynamics is offering a service assurance analyzer at aimed at minimizing service/network downtime by testing for vulnerabilities.


Mu Dynamics is also introducing a breakthrough Denial of Service (DoS) Module for its Mu-4000 appliance. The new module enables service providers to proactively identify and eliminate service, application and network downtime caused by DoS and Distributed DoS attacks.
Mu's new DoS Module for the Mu-4000 system helps service providers, equipment vendors and enterprise IT departments assess their exposure to poorly "hardened" networked services and systems that could become unreachable or unusable under unintentional or malicious Denial of Service attacks. The Module is pre-loaded with more than 40 customizable Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) templates including "Slammer Worm," "SIP Invite/Register," and "OSPF Hello" to model any networked application, product or service for known DoS and Distributed (DDoS) attacks. The Mu module also exposes the underlying software weaknesses or flaws that make networked applications subject to new forms of attack.


Mu said that unlike other solutions, its platform allows users to customize Layer 2-4 protocols and application-level services being targeted, as well as the packet payloads, and the attack rate and patterns. The DoS Module also automatically alters certain fields, such as source and destination ports and addresses, and performs other randomizations to ensure tests are as rigorous as possible. The solution uniquely allows any service of interest to be independently monitored while the system is concurrently stressed with D/DoS attacks. For example, the impact on an independent service like HTTP can be monitored while a server on a network is being attacked with a SIP Invite/Register Flood. The automation elements throughout the Mu solution constantly monitors and records system behavior during the test to produce repeatable, actionable results that can be used to remediate any weaknesses discovered.


The new financing was led by Focus Ventures and previous investors Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital and DAG Ventures. Mu now claims more than 100 active deployments worldwide.http://www.mudynamics.com