What is CDN? Learn All About Content Delivery Network

DDoS protection is a key aspect of the modern internet that many companies with an internet presence, both large and small, must consider if they are to provide excellent services to their end users with high levels of uptime.

As such, many companies have emerged offer high performance DDoS protection from distributed denial of service attacks. One such company is Imperva. Commenting on a recent record breaking DDoS attack targeting GitHub, Robert Hamilton, the Director of Product Marketing at Imperva, commented that even the 9 minutes of outage experiences by GitHub is too much. He goes on to say that DDoS protection services should come with a promise that attacks will be thwarted within seconds, which is exactly what Imperva offers.

DDoS Protection Benefits

GitHub uses Akamai for their DDoS protection, however Hamilton believes they did not act as quickly as they should have.

“Because we have so many customers, we’ll see any new type of DDoS attack very quickly. We saw the memcached-based amplification attack about a week before GitHub got hit, and introduced protections against it,” notes Hamilton.

“We have a relatively large internal security research team in Israel, and one of the things that they do continuously is monitor the network for known and new types of attacks. The latter are identified very quickly, typically within hours or even minutes, and a filter for them is then applied on our network so that similar future attacks are easily mitigated,” he continues.

Imperva offers many different kinds of DDoS protection services, including mitigation against so called pulse wave attacks, a new kind of DDoS attack that consists of a series of short, packet intensive burst.

“Pulse wave attacks can be aimed at a larger number of targets. Instead of attacking one organisation for ten minutes, the attackers can hit ten organisations continuously for a few seconds at a time, maximising efficiency,” Hamilton notes. “Packet-intensive attacks such as these are designed to overwhelm edge routers and bring the whole network down, and are unfortunately increasing in size and frequency.”

With these kinds of attacks becoming more and more commonplace, it’s easy to see why DDoS protection is so vital and a service all content and website owners should consider implementing.