By Tyler Burke, Product Manager
A new DDoS attack occurs every 39 seconds.
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a deliberate cyber attack against an organization’s online presence. Year after year, we witness an increase in their frequency, duration, and intensity. What’s worse, they are becoming increasingly sophisticated, automated, and stealthy, making it challenging for targeted organizations to identify and stop them.
If you’re the target of a large DDoS attack, you’ll experience digital chaos. Your systems are slower to respond. Your customers cannot reach you online. Your digital presence can shut down.
If you’re the target of a smaller DDoS attack, you may not feel the effects right away. These stealthier attacks can be “feelers” – searching for vulnerabilities in your security posture – so that that attacker can go in to inflict greater damage (such as stealing your data) later.
“We’re in an attackers’ market – very fertile soil for undetected cyber criminal activity. When today’s protection is as easy and effective as turning a switch, you need to do it.”
— Eric O’Neill, Former Counterterrorism Field Operative, FBI
National Security Strategist, Carbon Black
To better aid in the fight against cyber criminals, Zayo has added a powerful enhancement to our DDoS Protection service: the NETSCOUT® ATLAS® Intelligence Feed (AIF).
AIF Provides Proactive Protection
We used to think that we couldn’t stop DDoS attacks – we could simply defend against them. Our new enhancement turns that notion on its head. The AIF takes proactive, automated steps to stop DDoS attacks before they begin.
This means that attack traffic from known actors never hits our network, so it has zero chance of hitting yours. The less our security team needs to defend, the safer your data becomes.
The diagram below shows what DDoS Protection looked like before we added the AIF. The first line of defense were our scrubbers. They reacted to attack traffic by discerning legitimate from malicious traffic, and allowing the good traffic to pass while deflecting the bad. The customer experience was good, so long as Zayo’s scrubbers weren’t overloaded with attack traffic. They never were, but now we’re guarded against future attack traffic surges.
The supercharged radar of AIF adds a significant buffer between you and those who target you with DDoS attacks, shown in the diagram below. Zayo’s scrubbers are taking a well-earned break because the AIF shields block DDoS attack traffic from ever hitting our network.
Even better, the AIF is proactive.
How the AIF Works
The AIF taps into global traffic intelligence, analyzing fully 50% of worldwide Internet traffic. This means it’s constantly scanning the digital horizon for any signs of trouble, whether from incoming attacks or suspicious outbound activity, with more accuracy than ever. And when it detects something suspicious, it springs into action, automatically deploying real-time countermeasures to thwart cyber threats with precision, and preventing suspicious traffic from touching our network.
The AIF’s automated response reduces the manual interventions required by our Security Operations Center. Traffic from known bad actors is blocked from even entering the Zayo network.
For You: Peace of Mind
We know that DDoS attackers won’t stop innovating. Now, you can sleep a little easier knowing that the AIF is actively monitoring and blocking the Internet’s bad actors around the clock. The AIF is now integrated into Zayo’s DDoS Protection. Every protected customer enjoys its benefits. The AIF represents a significant leap forward in threat intelligence, allowing us to stay one step ahead of threat actors by proactively detecting and mitigating emerging DDoS threats.
Lightning-Fast Response Times
The AIF turbocharges Zayo’s proactive attack protection capabilities, which means we can respond to threats faster than ever before. With features like automated DDoS reputation blocking, we can quickly identify the source IP addresses and neutralize the traffic coming from them, without disrupting your legitimate network activity. And thanks to its advanced algorithms, the AIF can distinguish between friend and foe with pinpoint accuracy, minimizing false positives, and ensuring that your operations continue to run smoothly.
DDoS Protection and So Much More
With the AIF, Zayo doesn’t just stop at DDoS protection. We can detect other sneaky threats, like Internet vulnerability and brute force exploit attempts, and prevent them from wreaking havoc on your network as well.
How? The AIF detects and alerts on threats across the global threat landscape, including:
- Inbound and outbound command and control (C2) communications
- Automatic propagation of Internet of Things (IoT) botnets conducting brute-force attacks or exploiting known vulnerabilities
- Attempts to download or exfiltrate data to and from known adversary-owned servers
- Unauthorized use of devices known to be reflectors and amplifiers for launching DDoS attacks
- Known bot-compromised devices used to spread or launch DDoS attacks
When you subscribe to DDoS Protection, you get the Intelligence Feed, and you’ve added a significant buffer between your business and the criminals who would exploit it.