Parabon, a provider of computation on demand, has announced a new service for simulating real-world DDoS conditions, which employs its computing grid across the U.S. Companies can order such tests so as to see how their computer infrastructure and protection mechanisms will cope with a real attack.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) refers to attacks that use thousands or tens of thousands of compromised computers spread across the globe, which are commanded to send data packets towards a specified target. If enough traffic is created, the resources at the disposal of the target will eventually be consumed, resulting in an overload and lost of legit service.

Entitled the Parabon Blitz Distributed Testing Service, it will draw on the power and bandwidth available to between 5,000 and 10,000 computers, which are online at any given time inside the grid. Even though these numbers are still considerably lower than those of some of the DDoS-capable botnets out there, they are still better than the classic approach of using a single powerful server to bombard a target with useless packets in order to see how much it can withstand.

The Department of Defense has already tested the new Blitz service at the recent DISA Customer Partnership Conference in Anaheim, as all recent armed or political conflicts were accompanied by various cyber-attacks, including denial of service ones.

"As we move more and more into net-centric operations, the network and our information become prime targets for our enemies. Therefore, we must be able to discover and fix vulnerabilities before we field new capabilities; red team testing is essential if we are to do that," Dr. Steven Hutchison, Test and Evaluation executive at DoD's Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), commented.

"There's a lot of talk about the importance of cyber security, but few realize the degree to which many important government network services are vulnerable to cyber attacks," Dr. Steven Armentrout, the founder and CEO of Parabon, also shared. The recent attacks targeting government networks are said to have cost the Pentagon an estimated $100 million.

In addition to DDoS simulation, Blitz can also be employed to test load-balancing and bandwidth-streamlining mechanisms of heavily trafficked websites. "Many applications require the computational scale or distributed capabilities of a grid and realistic load and performance testing is a great example," Dr. Armentrout told about Grid Software as a Service (GSaaS) solutions such as Blitz.