Maintaining survivability of DWDM networks is crucial to multicast traffic. A link-or-node failure has a severe impact on optical multicast sessions as it can prune several communications simultaneously. In this paper, we present a novel candidate-cycle-based heuristic algorithm for node-and-link protection (CCHN) in dynamic multicast traffic. CCHN is based on p-cycle protection concept. The p-cycle concept ensures a fast restoration time and an efficient use of network capacity. Extensive simulations show that the blocking probability of our algorithm is lowest. Furthermore, the computational time of our algorithm is very low compared with the existing approaches, especially when traffic load is high.