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Contact sales@digital-coast.com to sign up for SOVA’s Verizon program.

Contact otsales@digital-coast.com to learn more and take advantage of 2 free months of One Talk service.

*Receive two complimentary months of service when you purchase and activate a One Talk compatible phone; thereafter, $25 per line, plus taxes and fees. New activations are subject to credit review. $25 bill credit will be applied as a credit in 2–3 billing cycles. Promotions cannot be combined with other offers. Only business customers qualify, excluding federal, state and local government. Excludes phone upgrades. Other terms, fees and restrictions may apply. Offer valid 7.1.2018–9.30.2018.

Announcing 2 Spiffs when selling Verizon solutions. New or existing SOVA Agent who submits the largest Verizon order in 3Q receives $10K bonus*. New or existing SOVA Agent who submits the largest Verizon order in 4Q, receives $10K bonus*.

* Q3 qualifying sales to be submitted Aug 28-Sept 30, 2018. Q4 qualifying sales to be submitted Oct 1- Dec 31, 2018. Order minimum is $10K MRC. Order must be for a Verizon product within the Verizon Partner Program portfolio and order must be accepted in the Verizon SPA system during eligible timeframe.

Contact us for more details, or to become a SOVA Agent.

For Immediate Release (Read full release here)

SOVA to Exhibit at CompTIA ChannelCon 2017 – Booth # 703

Verizon Platinum Solutions Provider to Showcase One Talk at the IT Industry’s Premier Conference for Education, Networking and Partnering in Austin, Texas #ChannelCon17                                                

Plains, PA July 14, 2017 — SOVA today announced it is exhibiting CompTIA ChannelCon 2017 “Be The Change,” the IT industry’s premier education, networking and partnering event at the Texas JW Marriott in Austin, Texas, July 31 – August 2, 2017.

Hosted annually by CompTIA, ChannelCon brings together executives and thought-leaders from across the technology industry for three days of educational sessions, panels, keynotes, and networking opportunities on the most important topics and trends impacting the industry. The event is attended by technology vendors, distributors and solution providers and IT professionals, as well as industry influencers, press and analysts from across the IT channel. More event details, including registration, are available here. Follow SOVA and CompTIA ChannelCon via Twitter using the hashtag #ChannelCon17.

Throughout CompTIA ChannelCon 2017, SOVA will engage with hundreds of IT professionals and highlight its Verizon One Talk program, which is available to channel partners in the United States. To secure an appointment with SOVA at ChannelCon, please email sales@digital-coast.com or call 570-824-6800 Ext. 111. Event attendees are encouraged to visit SOVA at booth number 703 during the Technology Vendor Fair.

“We are very excited to be exhibiting at this year’s CompTIA ChannelCon,” said Gene Esopi, SOVA’s President and Co-Founder. “What is even more exciting is that we will be showcasing One Talk, Verizon’s 4G LTE-driven unified communications system. It has been a huge game changer on so many levels.”

“We’re delighted to have SOVA join us this year for CompTIA ChannelCon,” said Kelly Ricker, executive vice president, events and education, CompTIA. “As our largest annual gathering, and we are proud to be able to deliver exceptional business value to ChannelCon attendees through leading-edge training and educational sessions, panels and keynotes featuring technology industry thought-leaders, and networking opportunities and learning tracks designed to help IT professionals expand their current skill-sets into areas that are re-shaping the technology landscape.”

To learn more about SOVA, visit www.Digital Coast.com, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

More information on the complete CompTIA ChannelCon 2017 program, including keynotes, panels and educational sessions, is included in the event agenda available here. Registration for CompTIA ChannelCon and the ChannelCon Vendor Summit is open and available online.

Media and IT industry analysts are encouraged to attend the conference. Highlights from CompTIA ChannelCon will be available on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #ChannelCon17.

CompTIA: Building the Foundation for Technology’s Future

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is the world’s leading technology association, with approximately 2,000 member companies, 3,000 academic and training partners, over 100,000 registered users and more than two million IT certifications issued. CompTIA’s unparalleled range of programs foster workforce skills development and generate critical knowledge and insight – building the foundation for technology’s future. Visit CompTIA online, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to learn more.

About SOVA

As a valued Verizon Partner Program member since 1994, SOVA has earned Platinum level status; agents benefit from select privileges that many telecom solution providers cannot offer. SOVA has customized programs for telecom agents, VARs, MSPs, and telesales organizations and provides customer solutions in every product category including Wireless, Mobility, VoIP, VoLTE, PIP (MPLS), Ethernet, Security, FiOS, and Local Services.  SOVA’s award-winning agent program features no quotas, no minimums, no commitments; dedicated pre-sales and post-sales specialists; simplified quoting and ordering; and a stateof-the-art agent portal. SOVA is headquartered in Plains, Pa., with additional locations in Pittston, Pa.; Denver; and West Palm Beach, Fla.

# # #

Press contacts:

Angela Welby

SOVA

570-824-6800 Ext 111

angela@digital-coast.com

Steven Ostrowski
CompTIA
630-678-8468
sostrowski@comptia.org

Marie Rourke

WhiteFox Marketing (for CompTIA)

Marie@whitefoxpr.com

714-292-2199

The threat is real, so is the solution.

DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks are real and the threat is escalating in volume and complexity. In fact, newsworthy attacks like the following are occurring almost every week:

• At least five major Russian banks came under continuous DDoS attack for two days. The attack was spawned by a wide-scale botnet involving at least 24,000 computers, located in 30 countries.
• Major internet services including Twitter, Spotify and Amazon suffered service interruptions and outages simultaneously over several hours due to a DDoS attack.
• The computer systems of two prominent Boston hospitals were simultaneously crippled by a DDoS attack. The hacker wanted to take revenge on one of the hospitals for personal reasons.[1]

Chad Foos, IT Security Engineer for Verizon Platinum Master Agent SOVA, said, “No one is immune to this. That’s the reality of putting your business online today.  They are becoming more and more common. If Twitter is vulnerable, anybody is vulnerable.”

In a DDoS attack, the perpetrator infects a random army of as many as 100s of 1,000s of poorly protected computers with malware designed to target a specific network(s).  This makes it impossible to prevent or stop the attack by blocking a single IP address. It is also nearly impossible to distinguish legitimate traffic from DDoS traffic. This incoming traffic overwhelms the network and either shuts it down or severely compromises it. Foos likens the attack to a few shoppers in a sea of shoplifters all trying to squeeze in a single revolving door.

Driving the increase in depth and breadth of DDoS attacks are hacktivists that tend to target government, university, hospital, and military servers; and professional cyber criminals that seek out high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment services, ecommerce sites, and insurance companies. Malicious hackers are just looking for any vulnerable network to take down. Organizations that tend to get hit the hardest financially by an attack are (in this order): financial services, health and pharmaceuticals, and the public sector.

A new and even more insidious DDoS attack is called BlackNurse. It allows hackers to launch large-scale attacks with significantly fewer resources than those required for basic DDoS attacks. Hackers can take down servers and firewalls with a single laptop. BlackNurse does not need that same army of devices and does not rely on high traffic volumes to be effective. Instead, it issues low volume ICMP error messages to servers and firewalls, which can easily overload and nullify main processors.[2]^,[3]

The good news is that DDoS attacks tend not to compromise secure information and the effects are fairly obvious quickly. In addition to a huge spike in network traffic, signs of a DDoS attack include:

• Unusually slow network performance
• Unavailability of a website (incoming)
• Inability to access any website (outgoing)
• Disconnection of a wireless or wired internet connection

The bad news is that there is no foolproof way to prevent a DDoS attack, typical security software is ineffective. A DDoS attack will last until someone or something steps in to filter and reroute traffic.

Why All Organizations Should Care

It’s not a big deal if a network is down for a few hours, right? So why should anyone care? Here’s why:

• People that are not able to use a particular site efficiently will turn to competition.[4]
• People that rely on the site for critical services will effectively be turned away—imagine someone with a serious injury attempting to connect to a healthcare site to find a network provider.
• Even though personal information may not be compromised, site users will see the site (and the organization) as unreliable and untrustworthy.
• When the site is back up, unsure if it is still infected, people will shy away from it.
• A poorly performing site just makes people nervous.

And the list goes on…immediate costs include:

• Direct revenue loss—organizations that depend on the site for revenue are hit the hardest.
• Loss of employee productivity.
• IT costs for investigation and response.
• Financial penalties and litigation.
• Loss of intellectual property.

A recent Ponemon Institute study estimated the average cost of a single minute of downtime due to a DDoS attack at $22,000. With an average downtime of 54 minutes per DDoS attack, this amounts to $1.19M.[5]^,[6],[7]

What Can Be Done to Mitigate an Attack

“Basic website security software will block IP addresses,” Foos said. “But there are issues.  For example, a lot of the hardware devices require the site to shut down. DDoS attacks with the potential to create even nominal financial damage will require a more sophisticated solution.”

Some basic DDoS Mitigation Tools Include:

• Application Front-End Hardware: This analyzes data packets as they enter the system, and then identifies them as priority, regular, or dangerous.
• Blackholing and Sinkholing: All traffic to the target site is sent to a non-existent server. A DNS sinkhole routes traffic to a valid IP address which analyzes traffic and rejects invalid traffic. This is not particularly effective.
• IPS-Based Prevention: This is effective only if the attacks have signatures (illegitimate content) associated with them, which is almost never the case today. However, because it has more processing power and granularity, an ASIC-based IPS can be effective.[8]
• DDS-Based Defense: Can block connection-based DDoS attacks and those with legitimate content but malicious intent.
• Firewalls: A simple rule could be added to deny all incoming traffic from the attackers based on protocols, ports, or the originating IP addresses.
• Routers and Switches: They have some rate-limiting capability. But most can be easily overwhelmed under a DDoS attack.

Automated Bandwidth Accommodation and Upstream Filtering

In order to wreak havoc, DDoS bandwidth-saturating floods count on the attacker having higher bandwidth availability than the target. High level tools, such as Verizon’s DDoS Shield, identify a standard Quality of Service (QoS) level, for example response time should be less than 200 milliseconds. This rule is linked to an automated platform that raises more bandwidth from Verizon in order to meet the defined QoS levels during the flood of DDoS traffic. As the bandwidth is increasing, all traffic is passing through a scrubbing center that separates bad traffic from legitimate traffic. It then sends only the legitimate traffic through to the server. The result is that those using the site will not experience any disruption in service.

Foos explained, “DDoS Shield is one of the most exciting tools that SOVA offers its agents. The way Verizon’s DDoS Shield works is that it says, OK you are under an attack.  Send the traffic to us and we will clean it.  It will all happen behind the scenes and will not interrupt service to your site. One of the reasons this is so effective is that Verizon has enormous DDoS reservoir services—they have a lot of capacity for filtering DDoS attacks.”

Back to the earlier analogy…legitimate holiday shoppers and nefarious shoplifters all trying to squeeze in a single revolving door.  Now imagine that this goes on for hours and it’s during a peak holiday shopping season (a time when DDoS attacks tend to be more frequent). And imagine that there is some way to instantly screen out all of the shoplifters and let the holiday shoppers through.  That’s what DDoS Shield does—it takes the damage factor out of DDoS attacks.

About Verizon’s DDoS Shield

DDoS Shield, backed by Verizon’s years of experience in the market, detects and identifies attacks and prevents them from taking down the targeted site.  It is a high-capacity, cloud-based DDoS protection service that quickly reroutes DDoS traffic and keeps IT resources readily available. It seamlessly scales broadband to control even large DDoS attacks no matter which carrier or internet service provider the customer is using. It also handles attacks against most internet-connected services; web, email, file transfer protocol (FTP) and more. DDoS Shield can be customized to align with risk management policies and can leverage the customer’s existing hardware to maintain IP traffic routing control. Even organizations whose own DDoS mitigation services fall short can easily send their traffic to DDoS Shield.

The hybrid, always-on method combines dedicated, locally deployed, fully managed MSS appliances to detect and allay initial attacks with a cloud-based mitigation service. This allows Verizon to easily move traffic from MSS to the cloud-based service if an attack is large or complex. DDoS Shield offers protection from the smallest to largest attacks.

 About SOVA

Agents think of SOVA first for Verizon solutions, including DDoS Shield. As a valued Verizon Partner Program member since 1994, SOVA has earned Platinum level status; agents benefit from select privileges that many telecom solution providers cannot offer. SOVA has customized programs for telecom agents, VARs, MSPs, and telesales organizations and provides customer solutions in every product category including voice and data, network, cloud, mobility, machine-to-machine, managed internet, VoIP, and global services.  SOVA’s award-winning agent program features no quotas, no minimums, no commitments; dedicated pre-sales and post-sales specialists; simplified quoting and ordering; and a state-of-the-art agent portal. SOVA is headquartered in Plains, Pa., with additional locations in Pittston, Pa.; Boston; Denver; and West Palm Beach, Fla.

[1] From: https://www.ddosattacks.net

[2] From: https://www.ddosattacks.net/new-ddos-attack-method-called-blacknurse-lets-hackers-take-down-firewalls-and-servers-from-a-single-laptop/

[3] ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) is used by network devices, such as routers, to send error messages and operational information indicating that a requested service is not available or that a host or router could not be reached.

[4] According to Microsoft, a customer will be less likely to visit a website if it is slower than a competitor site by more than 250 milliseconds. Source: : https://blog.radware.com/security/2013/05/how-much-can-a-ddos-attack-cost-your-business/

[5] This estimate depends on several variables, such as business segment, volume of online business, competitors, and brand value.

[6] From: https://blog.radware.com/security/2013/05/how-much-can-a-ddos-attack-cost-your-business/

[7] Ponemon Study at: https://security.radware.com/uploadedFiles/Resources_and_Content/Attack_Tools/CyberSecurityontheOffense.pdf

[8] An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is an integrated circuit customized for a dedicated use.

December 1, 2016 through Decemeber 31, 2016, SOVA Agents can earn a $100 bonus on eligible orders of Verizon Internet Dedicated, Private IP (MPLS), & Business Connection.