Micron21 seeks security professionals for cyber terrorism challenge

In a rally cry to pen testers and white hat hackers, Micron21 has put forth a 'cyber terrorism' challenge to see if anyone can breach their security with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The cloud and data center services provider will call forth participants during its live demonstration at AusCERT this week. Those participants must design and launch a DDoS attack against the company in real time.

"While DDoS attack methods are constantly evolving, the business risks involved remain the same. To stay ahead of these increasingly complex challenges, companies must invest in DDoS protection," comments Micron21's managing director James Braunegg.

He believes the company is confident that they can protect against attacks, which is why the company is issuing the challenge.

Participants can choose either a Micron21 protected or unprotected network, as well as the duration, size and attack configurations.

They can then see the results and the mitigation techniques the company uses to identify, monitor and mitigate each attack.

"Micron21 continually improves the way we guard against such attacks. We stop them from hindering network performance by acting quickly and diligently to rectify any security issues, regardless of the size or scope of the challenge involved," Braunegg adds.

Last year Micron21 teamed up with NSFOCUS to design an anti-DDoS solution. According to both companies, the solution uses a multi-stage approach to monitoring, detecting and mitigating attacks.

It works by protecting all packets to a series of algorithms that correctly identify malicious traffic. These can be applied to anti-spoofing, protocol analysis, user behaviour analysis, fingerprints and others.

The AusCERT conference kicks off in Queensland on Thursday and Friday.

Micron21 is a Melbourne-based data center provider. It has six data center locations around the world that are connected to more than 1500 global networks.