
Large businesses and enterprises are often the target of a distributed denial of service attacks. Just last year, several of the largest banking institutions within the United States sustained a large scale DDoS attack that left customers unable to access their online account information for up to days at a time. Arbor Networks has developed a solution that can mitigate a DDoS attack.
Arbor Networks has developed a cloud infrastructure that allows its customers to filter their traffic through Arbor Networks cloud. Once traffic is filtered through the Arbor Network’s cloud, the cloud determines which traffic is legitimate and which traffic is not and the legitimate traffic is allowed while the illegitimate packets are absorbed into the cloud. Arbor Networks says that their anti DDoS cloud can absorb up to 280Gbps of constant traffic flow.
This wide scope of bandwidth absorption that Arbor Networks provides is important because DDoS attacks are becoming more potent and coordinated. Several weeks ago, Arbor Networks released a report talking about the statistics of DDoS attacks. The report went on to say that half of DDoS attacks reach speeds over 1Gbps and this figure represents a 13% increase from the previous year’s total. Given the same time frame, attacks that generated over 10Gbps in traffic increased a staggering 41%. Attacks over 20Gbps more than doubled over the past year as well.
DDoS attacks are usually carried out through large botnets. The network of “Bots” is usually assembled by normal, everyday computer users who are unknowingly infected with viruses and malware. When instructions are sent out from the botnet’s creator, the machines that act as bots will repeatedly send information to the targeted server which results in server overloads and network unavailability. Legitimate traffic is then repelled because of the server or network’s unavailability.
Arbor Networks was founded in 2000 and its headquarters are located in Burlington, Massachusetts.