Australian Cloud Provider Delivers Immediate Response to DDoS Attacks

Bulletproof Networks, a tier-one managed hosting provider in Australia, was facing an increasing number of DDoS attacks on its network. Several of Bulletproof’s customers use its managed cloud service to host business-critical transactional websites. For these customers, site availability is critical to their existence; any amount of downtime can mean significant losses. Bulletproof also hosts a number of sites that are attractive targets for DDoS attacks. One of these sites, a technology forum, includes more than 300,000 active members who have been known to launch attacks at one another over disagreements. As a result, Bulletproof started to see an increasing number of DDoS attacks come across its network. To combat the attacks, Bulletproof put a process in place with its upstream providers. This process enabled the company to contact a provider during an attack to see if the provider could help block it from reaching the data center. The challenge with this approach was two-fold. First, the providers were not as quick to react to the attacks, causing a delay in mitigation and downtime for the hosted sites. Also, the only realistic way for the provider to assist was to blackhole the targeted site. While this stopped flooding to the Internet link, it still left the customer offline.

Bulletproof Networks is a tier-one managed hosting provider in Australia. The organization uses virtualization technologies to provide hosted cloud environments for its enterprise and government customers. Bulletproof relies on the Pravail® Availability Protection System (“Pravail APS”) from Arbor Networks to help protect its customers from DDoS attacks that threaten service outage. Many of Bulletproof’s clients are hosting transactional Web sites where downtime can mean losing hundreds of thousands—potentially millions—of dollars in revenue. With Pravail APS, Bulletproof offers more reliable, onsite protection for the cloud environments it provides to customers. The company enhances this protection by partnering with its upstream service providers through Arbor’s Cloud Signaling™ technology. This enables Bulletproof to better address threats beyond the organization’s bandwidth threshold.