Prolexic Predicts Increasing DDoS Attacks

While the upcoming holiday season brings a lot of business opportunities for e-commerce companies, it also brings an increased chance of attack for those companies, claims Prolexic Technologies, a provider of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services.

Offering a redesigned corporate web site and a new corporate brochure, Prolexic’s fourth quarter campaign is part of a major rebranding effort currently underway. The campaign features print advertisements, banner ads on web pages and in newsletters, as well as email promotions.  Prolexic has selected four of the leading e-Commerce print and online publications including Electronic Retailer, Internet Retailer, RIS News and Stores Media to reach e-Commerce providers.

“Many e-Commerce firms obtain DDoS protection from their ISP, hosting provider or content delivery network,” said Michael E. Donner, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Prolexic.  “What many companies fail to realize is that against the more complex Layer 7 and SSL attacks that target web applications, these mitigation services consistently fail to work.  The campaign raises awareness of this little known fact.”

Numerous marketing assets that are available for download are supporting the campaign.  A case study on SpaFinder.com, a global online resource for spa and wellness services and products, are also available in addition to two new white papers, “Tis the Season – for DDoS Attacks” and “The Executive’s Guide to DDoS”. The SpaFinder.com site was taken offline by a Layer 7 DDoS attack this summer before Prolexic stepped in to mitigate the attack. 

In other news, Prolexic claimed that recently it was able to successfully mitigate a major DDoS attack of unprecedented size in terms of packet-per-second volume that was directed against an Asian company in a high-risk e-commerce market.

The company figured that the DDoS attack generated larger than usual TCP SYN Floods and I CMP Floods, both of which are common DDoS attack methods. Considering the magnitude of the attack – the volume reached levels of approximately 25 million packets per second, there was nothing usual about it and other businesses should equip themselves against an escalating magnitude of attacks anticipated in the next 6 to 8 months.