DDOS Mitigation Services

Posted by Andrew Ogilvie in Security

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack involves attackers flooding a network or service with so many requests that the systems reach capacity and grind to a halt. Over the years DDOS techniques have evolved from simply flooding firewalls or DNS servers with junk to targeting infrastructure and applications.  Often attackers will test a network for weaknesses, as a prelude to a future malicious attack.

Increasingly Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as digital video recorders and IP cameras are being compromised for malicious use, contributing to harsher DDoS attacks as part of large "botnets" which are used to carry out such attacks.

DDOS attacks are getting larger but shorter in duration. In its Q3 2016 State of the Internet security report Akamai observed a 138 per cent increase in attacks over 100Gbps. Kaspersky reported in Q1 2017 that few attacks lasted more than 100 hours, indeed 82% of attacks lasted no more than four hours.

Extraordinary benefits from direct fiber connections to Level 3's DDoS Mitigation Service which leverages the benefits of Level 3's global IP network. Level 3, one of Extraordinary's 'upstream' internet providers is the world's largest Tier-1 Internet bandwidth carrier with 10 million miles of fiber worldwide.

Using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Internet traffic can be directed through Level 3's global mitigation network scrubbing centres for cleansing. Level 3 currently has nine global scrubbing centers across three continents capable of absorbing a total of 4.5 Tbps of attack traffic. Cleaning traffic in the scrubbing centres on the carrier network before passing only clean traffic onward to Extraordinary's own network is an extremely effective way of handling the DDOS threat.