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Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, odds are you've seen the various headlines claiming extraordinary monetary loses because of DoS (denial of service) attacks. Sure, the figures might be exaggerated, but let's face it: No one wants to have a perfectly architected, high-availability, load-balanced network crumble at the hands of a bored 14-year-old with a few copies of the latest and greatest DoS software.

So we decided to look and see what tools we had at our disposal to help with what seems to be an onslaught of incoming attack traffic. Coming to our aid were products from Captus Networks Corp., Foundry Networks, Mazu Networks, Radware, Reactive Network Solutions and Top Layer Networks.

We discovered that in this war, each product is like a special operative. Each has strengths and weaknesses, requiring you to make a wise choice about which to send into any given battle. We also gauged how many innocent-bystander packets fell prey to the products' retaliatory defenses against the DoS attacks--a result that is not to be taken lightly.

In the end, Radware's FireProof took our Editor's Choice award; it offers above-average DoS defenses for one of the best prices of all the enlisted products. As a bonus, the FireProof comes with a host of other features, such as firewall load-balancing and traffic management, which make it a versatile device to have in your arsenal.

Mazu Networks' TrafficMaster Enforcer also impressed us with its tenacious ability to ferret out the more stealthy attacks, and its bird's-eye-view traffic-analysis tools helped provide a lay of the land during the attacks. The Captus CaptIO G2 provided a combination firewall and configurable anti-DoS service, which makes it a great choice to station at the front line of any network.