DDoS attack does not necessarily cause downtime

Posted June 8, 2011 at 12:40 pm by Arjan de Jong in Infrastructure.

At the beginning of this month, the Rabobank suffered a DDoS attack, crippling mobile and online banking services. The attack also caused a poorly accessible email system.

It’s often said averting DDoS attacks is virtually impossible, whereas there are several hard and software solutions available to prevent such attacks. Filtering internet traffic, and use of web application fire walls, are only two examples of a whole range of means that can be used to combat common DDoS attacks.

In the summer of 2011, Jitscale successfully managed to prevent a DDoS attack hitting an international multinational, by use of, among other things, a RioRey appliance. Immediately after the onset of the attack, the alarm bells started ringing at Jitscale’s monitoring for the sites of this company, as performance of the sites dropped drastically.

Thursday morning Jitscale was officially requested to find a solution to the DDoS attack that was already active for more than a day. Next day, after installing RioRey, malicious traffic immediately receded. This is evident in the diagram below of Jitscale’s site performance measurement software.

That same evening the website was again fully available and visitors no longer notice anything about the DDoS attack that persisted for at least another week. Added bonus is the significant improvement of the site’s response time as this has now been made available through Jitscale proxies.

The diagram below shows how much of the malicious traffic since that Saturday was blocked by RioRey (purple lines) compared to legitimate traffic (blue lines).

Years of knowledge and management of complex infrastructures make Jitscale a reliable partner for the best possible advice and protection against, at least, the OWASP top 10 site attacks. This ensures your website, online application and/or business critical processes will remain available during such an attack. So you are protected from unnecessary loss of revenue and reputation damage.