Prolexic Mitigates Attack Against US Metropolitan Utility Firm

Prolexic, a company that offers Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, recently mitigated an attack against a U.S. metropolitan utility company earlier this month.

The utility suffered a Layer-4 DDoS attack on February 17, 2013, which left its website, online payment system and automated pay-by-phone billing system completely shut down. By launching a specially crafted routed DDoS defense, engineers were able to reduce the impact of the attack, which was targeting backend IPs directly.

The engineers were flexible enough to change their strategies on a regular basis and thus eliminated the strength of the attack in a timely manner. More than 155,000 stranded customers were again able to access the services, and employees started receiving external mails again.

"Utilities is another vertical market that is likely to be victimized in the coming months as attackers look beyond daily targets like e-Commerce and financial services," said Stuart Scholly, president of Prolexic. "Attackers are targeting network infrastructures to cause collateral damage to other shared resources, so organizations must think about their different areas of vulnerability beyond website URLs."

“Once traffic was on-ramped to Prolexic, the DDoS attack was mitigated in a matter of minutes and all services were restored to our website and automated pay-by-phone system," said a representative of the utility company. "Prolexic quickly ended what could have been a devastating blow to our customer service and our reputation for reliable service."

"Prolexic considers every DDoS attack to be zero-day and we have designed our mitigation infrastructure so we can respond accordingly," added Scholly. "As a result, clients can be confident that Prolexic's proxy or routed solutions can provide 100 percent protection against all distributed denial of service attacks."

Prolexic restores mission-critical Internet-facing infrastructures for global enterprises and government agencies within minutes. Ten of the world's largest banks and the leading companies in e-Commerce, SaaS (News - Alert), payment processing, travel/hospitality, gaming and other at-risk industries rely on Prolexic to protect their businesses.