Ixia’s IxLoad is a Finalist in this year's Best of Interop Awards in the Security category. The winner will be announced in a press release on Tuesday, May 10. This year, Best of Interop is hosted by InformationWeek Analytics. This acknowledgement underscores the critical importance that network security testing plays in today’s network and cloud environments.

The growing prevalence of cloud services creates multiple internal/external boundaries that must be protected against an increasing number and virulence of security threats. Every sector of the industry from manufacturers, service providers to enterprises, must constantly ensure that their devices provide the level of protection and performance needed.

Thorough testing of network security devices is the only way to truly understand their effectiveness and performance limits. Recent DDoS attacks, in conjunction with other malicious exploits launched against government and service provider networks, have caused major security breaches and resulted in substantial damage. Only with continuous vulnerability testing can network operators be certain that their security mechanisms are keeping pace with the threat environment while ensuring network performance.

IxLoad-Attack provides testing for network security appliances and systems to ensure that critical applications will be delivered in a secure environment even while under massive attacks and while balancing network performance with security effectiveness.

Preparing to fend off cyberattacks requires a test solution that can test with a combination of legitimate application traffic and malicious attack traffic, and then measure end-user quality of experience (QoE) as the relative volumes are tweaked. Ixia's IxLoad-Attack software does this by creating real-world traffic profiles, stateful to L7, and interspersing the industry's most comprehensive suite of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, vulnerability attacks and malware. IxLoad-Attack comes with a huge database of known vulnerabilities and malware, allowing the user to launch more than 6,000 unique attacks, and that list is updated bi-weekly to make sure it stays current. This update frequency is critical, since test cases must continuously adapt to the changing threat landscape.

IxLoad-Attack provides malicious traffic over both encrypted and non-encrypted links. IxLoad multiplay and attack traffic may be applied through IPsec, SSL/TLS and PPP encapsulations.

Be sure to visit Ixia’s network security testing demonstration at booth #1367 during Interop to see IxLoad-Attack in action with Xcellon-Ultra NP test interfaces, putting SonicWALL’s E7500 firewall through its paces.

For more information, check out our white paper on Network Security Testing or request a demo of IxLoad-Attack.