A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is where many geographically disparate, compromised hosts attack a single target. The flood of data sent to the target overwhelms one or more system resources (CPU, bandwidth, available connections etc.) thereby denying service to legitimate users of the targeted system. These types of attacks can quickly bring a target network or system to its knees, are almost impossible to prevent and are becoming more and more common.

In line with Net Logistics’ goal of continually improving the service we provide to our customers, we have tested and deployed a comprehensive DDoS protection and mitigation solution.

If Net Logistics detects a DDoS targetting a system within our network, the traffic to this target IP is diverted to our DDoS protection system. The system discards the DDoS traffic and the “clean” traffic is allowed to continue to the destination server, which remains online despite the attack. This DDoS mitigation is typically enabled for 24 hours and if the attack is still ongoing, the process continues for another 24 hours and is repeated until the attack is over. Once the DDoS ends, the routing is automatically restored to normal.

All of this is done completely transparently and without any action on the part of the customer.

As an interesting aside, shortly after deployment, this system underwent a “trial by fire” whereby a multi-gigabit DDoS was directed at our official cPanel update server. The attack was quickly mitigated without interruption to the service of Net Logistics customers or the target system!