Online game players that got new consoles or games this past Christmas might have been disappointed when they went to play. Both Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network were down for extended times of a day or more due to DDoS attacks. The now notorious group Lizard Squad had said it would target the gaming industry with attacks on Christmas—and...

As industry statistics suggests, many gaming providers are under DDoS attack continuously – each and every day.  Gamers are said to be one of the highest profile targets on the Internet, while at the same time their business models require 100% uptime.  These two facts manifest into quite the conundrum for today’s gaming providers. Live gaming sites...

Last November the Helsinki-based Bitcoin service Bitalo was hit by a DDoS attack that lasted two days. The attacker (known as DD4BC) contacted Bitalo to demand a ransom of 1 Bitcoin (about $326 USD) to stop the attack and to provide information on how he or she did the attack. The attacker even offered to provide guidance to Bitalo on how to prevent...

Observing and analyzing DDoS attacks over a period of time helps us all understand trends so that we can better prepare for the future. Verisign has recently published its DDoS Trends Report for the last half of 2014, and there are some interesting observations. For one thing, attacks are growing larger in size. In the attacks observed by Verisign in...

With regards to scrubbing-lane approaches, years ago Internet Service Providers (ISP) realized, “Yes DDoS is a problem we will have to deal with now and in the future”.  From some reports as early as the year 2000 ISPs began observing DDoS attacks traversing their networks.  How did they see the effects of DDoS attacks – way back then? Simple, they...

Relying on human intervention to mitigate DDoS attacks is like digging a well when your house is on fire.  When it comes to ensuring service availability and maintaining uptime and SLAs, hosting providers should use minimal (if any) manual intervention when defending against a DDoS attack.  Instead, real-time DDoS mitigation will allow providers to...