DDoS attackers start to up the Ante

According to a report published by Arbor Networks, over the past twelve months DDoS attacks as high as 40 Gb have been recorded. This represents an increase of 67% compared with the previous highest recorded attack in 2006 and a 100% increase compared with 2001. Whilst this new level is not yet the norm it is symptomatic of the general upward trend in the scale of attacks and an indication that it is a serious threat to ecommerce businesses that is unlikely to stop anytime soon. Suprisingly despite the high levels of reported DDoS victims, and the even higher level of unreported attacks, many companies are still prepared to risk their online revenues and corporate reputations by not putting adequate defences in place.

With more companies taking advantage of the new high speed connectivity to run their bandwidth hungry appplications such as VoIP and video streaming the need for a defence system capable of operating in that environment is even more pressing. At the moment very few vendors can offer a solution that is capable of handling anything much above 3 Gb and even then this usually involves some form of offline IP scrubbing technology,which seiuosly impacts the performance of the network to a level which means that voice systems become inopearble. Webscreen is one of the few dedicated DDoS technologies that is scalable to 10 Gb without the need to divert traffic offline and will provide protection aagainst 99.99% of the attacks that any organisation is ever likely to experience. Fortunately 40 Gb attacks are likely to remain very rare but for those organisations that have chosen to ignore the problem completely they can't say that they haven't been warned.