Prolexic Offers Nearly Real-Time DDoS Tracking

In a world where many people rely on the Internet for important tasks like banking and managing healthcare, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can really wreak havoc. As companies try to figure out new and innovative ways to combat these attacks, DDoS protection services company Prolexic decided to offer a free tool for the analysis and tracking of DDoS attacks: PLXpatrol.

PLXpatrol works by tracking the IP address and location of each bot used to attack Prolexic clients. These results are then displayed on the PLXpatrol website, where additional information such as attack type is available. Results can also be filtered by various criteria, such as country of origin. PLXpatrol was originally released in late 2012, with Version 2.0 having been released just this month. Version 2.0 includes the additional feature of displaying the data on a 3D globe. Currently, PLXpatrol is tracking an astounding 47 million bots from all around the world.

This information, like any that can be provided about DDoS attacks, could prove to be very valuable. With Prolexic reporting an 11 percent increase in attack bandwidth as compared to last year, DDoS attacks are becoming more powerful. Combine that with attacks that are lasting an average of two hours longer at 19 hours, and many institutions are finding their websites more vulnerable to outages.

Perhaps due to the increased power and duration of these attacks, the DDoS prevention market has been booming. Companies like Prolexic are in greater demand as more companies see their powerful infrastructure unable to withstand DDoS attacks with average bitrates of over 20Gbps. This is especially the case in the mobile marketplace, where analyst firm Infonetics (News - Alert) Research predicts that growth in DDoS prevention services is expected to grow by 32 percent by 2016.

Although this all seems to point toward DDoS attacks becoming a more prevalent problem, the good news is that the total number of attacks is actually down 14 percent from last year, and could continue getting smaller as information is shared in order to shut botnets down.