Large-scale DDoS assault consumed 23 Terabytes of inbound data in only two hours; outage would have cost up to $1.3 Million
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February 1, 2016 – NSFOCUS IB today announced that NSFOCUS Anti-DDoS System (ADS) has been used to mitigate a sustained, 90-Gbps Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack against Australian service provider Micron21, which offers mission-critical data center capabilities to clients around the world. This attack—the largest and broadest Micron21 has experienced so far—started relatively small, then rapidly increased over the course of 30 minutes. It eventually consumed a staggering 23 Terabytes of inbound data in only two hours; before the assailant(s) ceased the DDoS attack. Given the sheer scale of the problem, a full-blown outage would have potentially cost the customer the equivalent of at least $1.3 Million.
“Welcome to the modern world—this is the painful reality for data center operators everywhere, and why it’s absolutely critical for every corner of the industry to have solid DDoS mitigation capabilities in place,” said Allan Thompson, COO at NSFOCUS IB. “We’re honored that NSFOCUS ADS platform played such a vital role in helping Micron21 mitigate this criminal barrage, and we remain committed to developing and offering technologies that help our customers stay vigilant and protected against future attacks.”
Denial-of-service attacks, which have become sadly common in the contemporary computing environment, seek to make network resources unavailable to their intended users, usually by interrupting the services of a host connected to the Internet. A DDoS attack expands the scale of the problem by using thousands of unique IP addresses. Micron21 deals with several Layer 3 to Layer 7 DDoS attacks on a daily basis, and most peak at less than 1 Gbit in size. There are occasionally similarly sized and more sustained attacks, and Micron21’s investment in a cluster of NSFOCUS ADS devices distributed throughout the world are used to ward off these threats.
The most recent attack, which started on Jan. 14, 2016, has gone far beyond past episodes, due to the sheer size of the attack and the resources required to sustain it. Starting at 10 Gbits in size during the first hour, it rapidly increased over the course of 30 minutes, peaking at 90-Gbit maximum speed before receding to 40 Gbits before the attack ceased after approximately 2 and a half hours of sustained traffic load.
“Our priority at Micron 21 has always been to help our customers function 24/7—it’s why we provide ubiquitous power, cooling, physical and electronic security in addition to highly redundant data transmission services,” said James Braunegg, managing director at Micron21. “That’s also why we need best-in-class partners across the board, and NSFOCUS IB is our dedicated DDoS mitigation provider, and has been for the past three years. No one wants these attacks to happen, but by having the NSFOCUS ADS solution in place, we do everything we can to stay prepared.”
About Micron21
Established in 2008, Micron21 provides a portfolio of datacentre, hosting and cloud services. It is a trusted provider to thousands of clients spanning hundreds of thousands of websites and cloud services across every industry sector, nationally and internationally, including high-profile businesses and government agencies. Clients rely on Micron21 to provide mission-critical datacentre services 24x7x365 within its world-class, soon to be certified tier 4 factility. For more information, visit www.micron21.com
