Prolexic Technologies - Services

Services

Prolexic provides DDoS mitigation services. To do this, the company opened its first network traffic scrubbing center in North America in 2003, in Europe in 2005, and in Asia in 2007. In 2012, the company’s traffic scrubbing capability was in excess of 500 Gbit/s of bandwidth and comprised multiple carriers in a distributed global network.

Because many DDoS attacks are concerted efforts by sophisticated live attackers, Prolexic uses a combination of automated tools and human expertise as part of its services. In 2012, company said it had successfully stopped all DDoS attacks affecting its clients to-date, including attacks against application servers, such as Layer 4 (SYN floods) and Layer 7 attacks, as well as GET flood attacks, zero-day attacks, UDP/ICMP floods, TCP flag abuses, DNS reflection, and DNS attacks. Prolexic is said to have mitigated the largest DDoS attack of 2011, which involved 250,000 computers infected with malware.

The company’s service typically mitigates attacks within 5 to 20 minutes after a client’s network traffic starts flowing through a scrubbing center. Prolexic mitigated more than 30,000 DDoS attacks from 2003 - 2011. In 2011, Prolexic mitigated from 10 to 80 attacks daily.

The company provides three kinds of services to its clients:

• Monitoring services that detect attacks. One monitoring service includes direct flow-based monitoring of a client’s network routers. Another service places monitoring tools at a client’s site to detect application layer attacks.
• Mitigation services that intercept attacks. One such mitigation service from Prolexic reroutes a client’s network traffic to Prolexic’s cloud-based platform when an attack is detected. Another maintains an always-on physical connection to Prolexic’s platform. A third service changes a client’s DNS to redirect network traffic through Prolexic’s platform – this is the approach the company uses to quickly intercept an ongoing attack against a new client.
• Insight into DDoS attacks for partners and the public. Prolexic tracks global DDoS attacks and publishes a report each quarter. These reports are available to the public. In addition, Prolexic aggregates intelligence information from multiple sources and shares reports detailing active botnets and fraud-linked IP addresses with its partners.