With "almost daily (cyber) attacks" being mounted on private computer networks and Indian government Web sites, Tata Communications has now come up with a solution through its DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) detection and mitigation service.

The company's DDoS detection and mitigation service promises real-time application-layer analysis of all IP traffic traversing its global IP backbone. By monitoring and analyzing customer traffic in real time, and on a 24x7 basis, Tata Communications seeks to provide proactive notification of actionable events to its customers. The company claims its analysts can quickly determine the root cause of changes in traffic -- be it a violation of usage policy, a worm outbreak, or a DDoS attack by millions of computers from across the globe.

Tata Communications claims such attack traffic is filtered in its IP backbone before customer resources can be impacted, leading to optimum utilization of bandwidth.

As reported by a leading daily, India is estimated to have close to 50,000 malicious Bots with millions more such around the globe. The point the officials are making here is that there are networks in India and internationally that are controlled from outside -- "a sort of cyberspace fifth column". The lurking danger is that at any appointed time, external controllers of BOTNETS could command the infected networks of "zombie" computers to potentially create a national security emergency by flooding traffic at key network and application infrastructure.