Prolexic Mitigates DDoS Attacks against Henyep
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services specialist Prolexic said it had mitigated attacks consisting of multiple SYN, GET and ICMP (aka ping attack) floods directed against websites operated by London-based online trading and financial services company Henyep Capital Markets.
Prolexic reports that the initial DDoS attack caused performance issues on multiple Henyep trading websites for 24 hours. Company management did not respond to the DDoS attackers’ demand for a ransom in exchange for ending the attack, and instead contacted Prolexic, whose mitigation engineers restored access to all services on the sites within minutes after routing traffic through the group’s global scrubbing centres, where malicious traffic was removed.
“Financial services companies like Henyep and their mission critical online services continue to be favourite targets of DDoS attackers,” said Prolexic’s president, Stuart Scholly. “It is vitally important to have DDoS mitigation services in place from a proven, experienced provider with the global resources and bandwidth capable of handling attacks well in excess of 50 gigabytes per second [Gpbs].”
The group’s DDoS mitigation engineers in the US quickly identified the initial attack as a SYN flood, followed by multiple GET floods. The attack campaign peaked at 35.30 megabits per second (Mbps), 8.10 kilo packets per second (Kpps), and 122.00 kilo connections per second (Kconn) over two days. The engineers monitored the attacks and counteracted the perpetrator’s changing attack vectors throughout the campaign. As a result, the attackers were unable to take down the Henyep site, nor disrupt services despite the length of the attack.
According to data in Prolexic’s
‘Q4 2012 Global DDoS Attack Report’
, financial services, electronic commerce (e-commerce) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies were targeted with high bandwidth DDoS attacks in excess of 50 Gbps in Q412. Over the three month period, Prolexic logged more attacks than ever before against its global client base and predicts the scale and diversity of DDoS attacks will continue to increase.