Enhance Task management resilency

Denial-of-service attacks can consume CICS resources starving legitimate CICS workload and resulting in maxtask and SOS conditions in the CICS regions. Severe Dos attacks can even result in CICS region termination. This marketing requirement is requesting changes in CPSM such that CICS regions can be shielded from unwanted workload arriving at the CICS door. The request is for a dynamic interface whereby bothersome work can be identified either at the WLM layer, or within the CICS address space, resulting in subsequent work matching a profile (such as Trancode/IP Address/Userid/length of time in queue/Time of day) be returned prior to reaching the CICS region. The screening profile used to govern arriving workload should be dynamically changeable (by CICS and or WLM) such that work matching the criteria can immediately be accepted, or rejected based on business events.

Additionally there may be some opportunities to address task management within the CICS address space that may help alleviate the impact of Dos attacks that would complement the CPSM WLM requirement above. There appears to be two problem areas that perhaps there may be better solutions. Firstly, the overhead within a CICS region of purging tasks that are subject to Tranclass purgethreshold limits and secondly what to do with a large amount of tasks queued in a CICS region. Both of these scenarios can be extremely disruptive to workflow and can result in Maxtask and SOS conditions.