Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Arbor Networks: DDoS Threat Landscape Evolves, First ipV6 DDoS Attacks

Ideologically-motivated ‘hacktivism’ has become a leading motivation for DDoS attacks and when coupled with the readily-available DDoS attack toolkits, it is clear that the security landscape has evolved to a whole new level, according to a newly released " 7th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report: from Arbor Networks.


The rise of hacktivism will lead network operators to update their risk assessment models. The report, which reflects input from 114 service providers throughout the world, provides a view from the front lines of a global battle against botnets and DDoS attacks.


“What we saw in 2011 was the democratization of DDoS,�? said Roland Dobbins, Arbor Networks Solutions Architect for Asia-Pacific, and the primary author of this year’s report. “Any enterprise operating online - which means just about any type and size of organization - can become a target, because of who they are, what they sell, who they partner with or for any other real or perceived affiliations. Furthermore, the explosion of inexpensive and readily-accessible attack tools is enabling anyone to carry out DDoS attacks.


Some highlights:



Over the past year, there has been a significant increase in the prevalence of high-bandwidth DDoS attacks in the 10 Gbps range.


Twenty-five percent observed DDoS attacks that exceeded the total bandwidth into their data center.


The single largest reported DDoS attack during the survey period was 60 Gbps, down from 100 Gbps reported in 2010.


Sophisticated application-layer DDoS attacks have become commonplace and complex multi-vector DDoS attacks with both high-bandwidth and application-layer attack components are rapidly gaining in popularity with attackers.


The first IPv6 DDoS attacks have been reported, although they remain rare.
http://www.arbornetworks.com/report
  • In January, Alcatel-Lucent announced plans to integrate Arbor Networks' Threat Management System into its 7750 IP Service Router to provide advanced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection in carrier clouds. The capabilities will be delivered either as a standalone appliance or running on an MS-ISA blade for the 7750 Service Router. The solution delivers 60 Gbps+ performance per chassis.

Sprint Says Network Vision On Track, LTE by Mid-Year

Sprint Nextel reported revenues of $8.7 billion for Q4 2011, 5 percent higher than in the fourth quarter of 2010 and the third quarter of 2011. The quarterly year-over-year and sequential improvements were primarily due to higher wireless service and equipment revenue offset by a reduction in wireline revenue.


Sprint reported total net subscriber additions of 1.6 million during the fourth quarter of 2011 – the best quarterly result in six years – bringing total ending subscribers to the highest level in the company’s history.


"Our strong fourth quarter performance illustrates the power of matching iconic devices like the iPhone with our simple, unlimited plans and industry-leading customer experience,�? said Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO. “During the past year, Sprint added more than 5 million net new customers and grew wireless service revenue by more than 5 percent, including 17 percent for the Sprint platform. This momentum gives us confidence as we execute our Network Vision upgrade and 4G LTE roll-out."


Some highlights for the quarter:


Sprint’s Network Vision initiative remains on schedule and on budget.


Field integration testing was completed in Q4 and the first multi-mode base station was launched.


Sprint expects to bring approximately 12,000 Network Vision sites on air by the end of 2012 and to complete the majority of its Network Vision roll-out in 2013.


Sprint expects to begin launching 4G LTE by mid-year 2012. In addition to Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Atlanta, Kansas City and Baltimore will be among the initial six major cities to launch.


Wireless service revenues for the fourth quarter increased more than 7 percent year-over-year, driven by Sprint platform postpaid ARPU growth of $3.69 – the largest year-over-year increase on record across the U.S. wireless industry.


Strong revenue growth and cost management partially offset the impact of increased equipment net subsidies and sales expense associated with the successful launch of the iPhone.


Forty percent of Sprint’s 1.8 million iPhone sales in the fourth quarter were to new customers. Based on internal estimates, including incremental costs associated with iPhone sales, the combined impact of iPhone and Network Vision costs reduced fourth quarter Adjusted OIBDA margin, which was 10.8 percent, by approximately 8.8 percentage points.


Total postpaid net additions of 161,000 for the fourth quarter represent the tenth consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement and were driven by continued strength of the Sprint platform, which had net postpaid additions of 539,000. This is the seventh consecutive quarter of net postpaid subscriber growth on the Sprint platform.


For Q4, Sprint posted adjusted OIBDA of $842 million for the fourth quarter and nearly $5.1 billion for the full year 2011. There was a net loss of $1.3 billion and a diluted loss of $.43 per share for the quarter, which includes pre-tax, non-cash charges of $241 million, or $.08 per share, consisting of asset and impairment charges of $78 million on property, plant and equipment, $135 million on Sprint’s investment in Clearwire and $28 million in severance costs.
http://www.sprint.com

Verizon and BT Extend Cisco TelePresence

BT and Verizon Enterprise Solutions are extending the range of their Cisco Telepresence services to enable their customer to communicate with each other. Verizon and BT telepresence customers will experience the same interface and service quality, with similar scheduling, support, security and encryption. In addition, customers will have access to a directory to determine which organisations are registered and are available for intercarrier telepresence meetings and where the sites are located.
http://www.btplc.com
http://www.verizon.com

Opnext's Revenue Falls 38% Due to Thai Flood

Opnext reported quarterly revenue of $53.1 million, down 38.3 percent sequentially and down 45.3 percent compared to the same quarter a year earlier, primarily due to the loss of production capacity at Fabrinet, Opnext's contract manufacturer in Thailand, following the flooding in October 2011.


Revenue from sales of 10Gbps and below products decreased 42% compared to the quarter ended September 30, 2011 due to the flooding in Thailand. Revenue from sales of 40Gbps and above products decreased 37% compared to the quarter ended September 30, 2011 due to lower sales of 40Gbps and 100Gbps client-side modules.


Cisco Systems, Inc. and Hitachi, Ltd. each represented 10% or more of total revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2011 and combined represented 43% of total revenue. Gross margin of 3.8% was down 16.3 percentage points sequentially and down 16.2 percentage points compared to the quarter ended December 31, 2010.


"I am very pleased with the progress we made in the flood recovery process this quarter," said Harry Bosco, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Opnext. "During the quarter, we started limited assembly and testing of our 10G modules at our facilities in Japan and California and we plan to restart manufacturing in Thailand at Fabrinet's Pinehurst campus this month, with a return to pre-flood production capacity expected by March 31, 2012."


"As expected, due to the disruption caused by the flooding, our 10G and below revenues were down significantly in the December quarter. Our 40G and above revenues were also down as orders were impacted by the timing of next-generation 40G and 100G system deployments," added Mr. Bosco. "Based on our 10G production recovery plan and the improvement to date in orders for 40G and above products, we expect total revenue for the March 2012 quarter will be between $70.0 million and $75.0 million," concluded Mr. Bosco.
http://www.opnext.com

Calix's Q4 Revenues Top $91 Million up 9.5% Sequentially -- New OLT Cards Launched

Calix reported Q4 2011 revenues of $91.6 million, an increase of 9.5% compared to $83.7 million for the third quarter of 2011, and flat compared to $91.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. GAAP net loss for the fourth quarter of 2011 was $5.2 million, or $(0.11) per basic and diluted share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $6.9 million, or $(0.15) per basic and diluted share for the third quarter of 2011, and compared to a GAAP net loss of $0.7 million, or $(0.02) per basic and diluted share reported for the fourth quarter of 2010.


Calix also introduced two new optical line terminal (OLT) cards to its Unified Access portfolio:


The E7-20 GPON-8x – With eight ports per card, the GPON-8x line card doubles the GPON port capacity of the E7-20 ESAP, allowing service providers to efficiently serve over 10,000 GPON subscribers from a single chassis at a 64-way split. The E7-20's two-terabit backplane and non-blocking throughput capacity combined with the company's 700GE family of ONTs allows any of these subscribers to receive up to 1 Gbps of downstream or upstream capacity, enabling a vast array of potential service options.


The B6-318 – This card features advanced high-density point-to-point GE technology, with 24 compact small form-factor pluggable (CSFP) ports that can serve 48 subscribers per card with symmetrical high-speed data services up to 1 Gbps. The B6-318 seamlessly connects to the 700GE family of ONTs and features two industry standards 10 Gigabit small form factor pluggable (XFP) ports and two SFP+ 10GE/GE ports.


Calix noted that more than 70 percent of its over 1000 customers globally are now deploying fiber access services across the B-Series, C-Series, and E-Series platforms.
http://www.calix.com

Airvana Files Suit Against Ericsson

Airvana Network Solutions filed a lawsuit in the State of New York against Ericsson alleging the misappropriation of its technology to secretly develop a knock-off product with a Korean partner. Airvana is seeking $330 million in damages.


Airvana notes that it first entered into a partnership with Nortel in 2001 covering both hardware and software of its femtocell technology. In 2005, Nortel convinced Airvana to hand over its proprietary hardware designs so that Nortel could take over manufacturing the hardware. Airvana expected to be paid a royalty for each product sold and it would continue to develop the software. In 2009, Ericsson purchased Nortel's North American wireless equipment business after Nortel went bankrupt, and among the assets it acquired from Nortel was the contract with Airvana. In late 2011, Ericsson informed Airvana that it was planning to sell a competing product . Airvana argues this violates the contractual agreement in force between Airvana and Ericsson.


Ericsson is Airvana’s sole customer for the technology that provides all of its current revenues.
http://www.airvana.com

Polaris Wireless Builds Wireless Location Systems with RadiSys ATCA

Polaris Wireless, which supplies high-accuracy, software-based wireless location solutions, is leveraging Radisys' AdvancedTCA (ATCA) platform solution for OmniLocate, its universal location platform, which network operators and government agencies rely on to enable public safety, surveillance and other location-based services.


Specifically, Polaris Wireless is using Radisys' ATCA platform to improve scalability and upgradeability of its OmniLocate platform for emergency call management (E911) and security applications. The company was able to convert to the Radisys x86 solution in less than six months and reduce its costs significantly. In addition, Polaris Wireless was able to enhance OmniLocate performance threefold using the latest processor technology. The Radisys blade server approach enables Polaris Wireless to upgrade its OmniLocate platform performance based on the Intel roadmap by simply swapping blades.
http://www.radisys.com
http://www.polariswireless.com

Bouygues Telecom Picks's Ericsson's RBS 6000

Bouygues Telecom is deploying Ericsson's RBS 6000 for a multi-year network upgrade programme. The equipment will be installed in the Île de France, Centre-Alpes and Méditerranée regions of France to transform the operator's existing 2G and 3G radio networks and rollout 4G/LTE. Financial terms were not disclosed.


Olivier Roussat, CEO of Bouygues Telecom, said: "Ericsson has proven its ability to manage large-scale network projects with us in the past. This project will enable us to deliver a high level of service and further enhance the experience of people who use our 2G, 3G, and LTE technologies."http://www.ericsson.com

Gigamon Expands its Traffic Visibility Fabric

Gigamon has expanded its H Series Intelligent Traffic Visibility Node portfolio with a smaller form factor chassis with a high-resiliency multi-chassis "clustering" capability.


Gigamon's flagship H Series are designed to handle millions of traffic flows each second, delivering them intelligently to the appropriate infrastructure security or managing systems.


The new GigaVUE-HD4 is a 5U rack-mountable, four-slot platform for core data center infrastructure. It supports a maximum of eight ports of 40Gbps, 96 ports of 10Gbps ports, or 176 1Gbps ports.


The GigaVUE-HD4 uses Gigamon's FlowMapping technology to intelligently filter, forward, replicate and manage the flow of traffic from production networks to management, monitoring and security tools.


Gigamon also released an upgrade to its H Series software that enables network architects to create a "Master/Slave" control-plane clustering structure within the fabric to include multiple H Series visibility nodes. For added resiliency, secondary nodes can assume the role of "master" if connectivity is lost to the original master. Additional capabilities and functionality has been added in the form of a graphical user interface (GUI) specifically designed to efficiently manage and control the many hundreds of ports contained across a Cluster of H Series nodes.


"A significantly increasing challenge faced by IT professionals is to maintain accurate and pervasive management and monitoring of the rapidly rising volumes of traffic traversing the enterprise infrastructure. The past approach – to connect monitoring and management tools into specific segments or domains of the network – will not scale into the future. A new approach is required, and we believe the Visibility Fabric architecture represents a compelling solution. Without the Visibility Fabric in place, network managers lack the ability to ensure pervasive visibility that enables management tools to effectively monitor this increasing volume of traffic." said Ted Ho, Gigamon CEO.
http://www.gigamon.com

Akamai Acquires Blaze Software

Akamai Technologies has acquired Blaze Software Inc., a start-up based in Ottawa, Canada, that specializes in front-end optimization (FEO) technology. Financial terms were not disclosed.


Blaze provides technology designed to automatically optimize the code on a web page during the delivery process to ensure faster transmission of content and a faster rendering of the page, whether served to a PC, tablet or smartphone. As a cloud-based service that requires no software or code changes by the customer, Blaze's offering is designed to work with any web site.


Akamai said the acquired technology will complement its site acceleration solutions with software designed to optimize the speed at which a web page is rendered, regardless of end user device.
http://www.akamai.com
http://www.blaze.io

Akamai's Revenue Grow to $324 million, up 15% Sequentially

Akamai reported Q4 2011 revenue of $324 million, up 15 percent from the prior quarter and 14 percent year-over-year, and annual revenue increased 13 percent year-over-year to $1,159 million. Fourth quarter GAAP net income increased 42 percent quarter-over-quarter and 14 percent year-over-year to $60 million, or $0.33 per diluted share, and full-year GAAP net income increased 17 percent year-over-year to $201 million, or $1.07 per diluted share.


"Akamai posted record results in the fourth quarter, with accelerated growth across our business." said Paul Sagan, President and CEO of Akamai. "We believe our Content Delivery and Cloud Infrastructure solutions are stronger than ever, and we look forward to further enhancing our Cloud Infrastructure portfolio with the completed acquisition of Blaze and the planned acquisition of Cotendo, which may close as early as the first quarter."http://www.akamai.com

ARRIS Beats Guidance -- Sees Connected Home as Driver for Growth

ARRIS reported Q4 2011 revenue of $281.1 million, up from both the fourth quarter 2010 revenues of $266.2 million, and third quarter 2011 revenues of $274.4 million. Full year 2011 and 2010 revenues were $1,088.7 million and $1,087.5 million, respectively.


"Our business continues to be driven by the dramatic rise in the number and usage of connected devices in the home. This in turn drove strong demand for our products during the December quarter. Our customers continue to increase their broadband market share and expand their networks as they meet subscribers' demand for more bandwidth," said Bob Stanzione, ARRIS Chairman & CEO, "Looking forward, I believe we are well positioned for revenue growth as we continue to see gathering momentum across our entire product line."


During the fourth quarter, the Company closed its acquisition of BigBand Networks.


Adjusted net income (a non-GAAP measure) in the fourth quarter 2011 was $0.21 per diluted share, compared to $0.19 per diluted share for the fourth quarter 2010 and $0.21 per diluted share for the third quarter of 2011. Adjusted net income in the fourth quarter 2011 includes approximately $(0.01) net loss per diluted share related to BigBand's operations (excluding acquisition, severance, amortization expenses). Adjusted net income was $0.82 per diluted share for the full year 2011 and compares to $0.85 per diluted share for the full year 2010.


Gross margin for the fourth quarter 2011 was 37.9%, which compares to the fourth quarter 2010 gross margin of 36.2% and the third quarter 2011 gross margin of 36.5%.
http://www.arrisi.com

Cisco Posts Strong Quarterly Numbers




Cisco reported record second quarter net sales of $11.5 billion, net income (GAAP) of $2.2 billion or $0.40 per share, and non-GAAP net income of $2.6 billion or $0.47 per share for the quarter ending 28-January-2012.


The company said its is benefiting from strategic restructuring undertaken last year and gaining market share as it captures a greater percentage of IT spending.


"We delivered strong performance this quarter with record revenue and earnings per share," said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO. "We are executing well on our three-year plan to drive earnings faster than revenue. Our operational focus continues to yield positive results -- we hit our billion dollar expense reduction a quarter early -- and our ongoing innovation enables our customers to solve their critical business needs. You will continue to see a focused and aggressive Cisco that is helping our customers use intelligent networks to transform their businesses."


Some highlights from the quarter:


Employee headcount at the end of the quarter was 63,870 -- up by about 400 employees over the previous quarter.


Cash flows from operations were $3.1 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, compared with $2.3 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2012, and compared with $2.6 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2011.


Cash and cash equivalents and investments were $46.7 billion at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2012, compared with $44.4 billion


Now that restructuring is behind it, Cisco expects to be more active with mergers & acquisitions this year.


Guidance for the coming quarter call for growth of 5%-7%.
http://www.cisco.com