Prolexic Protects 1ink.com's E-Commerce Sites from DDoS Attacks

Prolexic, a provider of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, was recently selected by 1ink.com, an online retailer of inkjet and laser toner cartridges, to protect its e-commerce sites.

Traditionally, e-commerce sites have been attractive targets for DDoS attacks. There have been instances of money extortion, sabotage of competition websites and blocking of many Fortune 500 companies.

According to Prolexic’s Q1 2013 DDoS report, average attack bandwidth totaled 48.25 Gbps in the first quarter of 2013, a 718 percent increase over last quarter. Also, the average packet-per-second rate reached 32.4 million.

As DDoS attacks have increased their frequency and sophistication, e-commerce sites are getting ready to improve their defensive posture against DDoS attacks.

1ink.com turned to Prolexic after experiencing a DDoS attack that brought down 101inks.com, one of the smaller 1ink.com e-Commerce sites, for more than a day. During the attack, the company had to route traffic from 101inks.com to their other domains in an attempt to mitigate the attack.

Prolexic solution helped the company mitigate the attack within five minutes.

“We concluded from our post-attack forensic analysis that it is likely the 1ink.com websites were mistakenly targeted,” said Stuart Scholly, president of Prolexic. “This illustrates that even random events can have significant financial impact on a business if some level of DDoS mitigation is not in place.”

In another instance, the company’s main e-commerce site at 1ink.com was hit with another attack – a combination SYN and DNS flood that peaked at 70 Gbps. At this time the DDoS attack did not bring the site down because Prolexic’s PLXproxyDDoS protection service was already in place.

Five days later, the DDoS attackers struck again, and this time too, 1link.com was able to quickly detect and mitigate the attack without any action from 1ink.com.

“Having Prolexic’s DDoS mitigation service is like having insurance against DDoS attacks, and as a result, these last two attacks did not have any effect on our business,” said Roland Davoudikia, chief executive officer of 1ink.com, said.

“There was the potential to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in online sales each day, along with collateral damage to our partner relationships. Fortunately, none of that happened. I can’t imagine running my business without DDoS attack protection from Prolexic,” Davoudikia added.