BT to make DDoS mitigation affordable

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 27 Nov 2006 at 11:28

This leaves commercial sites having to dig into their own wallets for protection. One online gambling site, for example, uses DDoS mitigation specialist Prolexic to direct traffic through its datacentres when under attack. It's expensive, but not as expensive as losing literally millions of pounds in unplaced bets if - over a key sporting weekend - the site is taken down by an attack. It's a gamble they can't afford to lose.

Chris Tolson, Infrastructure Manager at a large online gambling company, said: 'We would struggle to handle with our current bandwidth constraints and the hardware we have in place to fight an attack. We are at the end of the day an IT department focused on trying to deliver the fastest and most reliable site for our betting products and I do not have a trained team of professionals waiting for the next DDoS... In addition, DDoS is a different type of malware - there is a real person on the other end trying to take you offline. Accordingly, effective DDoS protection needs to be delivered as an upstream service, versus a hardware-only solution (we have the hardware but only to augment the Prolexic service and buy us some time in moving traffic over to them for clean up), with a team of DDoS experts that can combat the latest attack vectors in real-time.'

'It is vital that legitimate traffic continues to come through to our website even while we're under attack and we do not know of anyone other than Prolexic who can ensure this with today's increasingly strong and tenacious attacks,' he added.

The cost of Prolexic on one hand stacks up well against multimillion pound losses on the other. But DDoS attacks are cheap and easy to create, while being expensive to stop.

Keith Laslop, president of Prolexic said: 'I've seen them on forums where you can hire bots for next to nothing. Four cents a bot. So you could take down a site very cheaply. You could get enough together for, say, a 50Mbits DDoS attack. You could take someone out with that.'

And during the first six months of 2006, Symantec observed an average of 6,110 DoS attacks per day.