Intelligent SME.tech Issue 23 | Page 45

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It had many users that were being impacted and struggled to find the one IP address that was being targeted . With no automated DDoS attack protection in place , this was a virtually impossible task .

IT staff had to painstakingly scan its network connections looking for patterns that would indicate the particular IP address that was getting attacked the most . Once identified , they had to enable ‘ blackhole advertisements ’ of the IP address being attacked , notifying upstream carriers to stop all traffic to that destination .

“ That would stop the upstream carrier saturation , so the rest of our network would not lose Internet service ,” said Ben Leslie , CEO at Columbia Wireless .

“ Of course , that meant the owner of the attacked IP address was still completely offline for the duration of the attacks .”

To address the problem of DDoS attacks and the ineffective process it had for dealing with them , Columbia Wireless deployed Corero ’ s SmartWall DDoS Protection solution .

Among the reasons the ISP selected the platform , over other DDoS offerings , was that Corero is one of the leading and most experienced DDoS solution providers in the market , said Leslie .

The SmartWall family of DDoS protection solutions is designed to mitigate the full range of volumetric attacks while , at the same time , maintaining the availability of the services it ’ s protecting , by not disrupting the delivery of legitimate network traffic .

SmartWall is capable of handling large network-based DDoS attacks or floods , reflective amplified spoof attacks , and attacks that are typically too low to be detected by traditional out-of-band solutions . still have a big impact on Business Continuity , companies need this type of dedicated , always-on DDoS protection solution to prevent attacks from doing damage .

SmartWall leverages an innovative and automated , multi-stage detection and mitigation pipeline to ensure the highest possible protection . It ensures that legitimate traffic isn ’ t affected by damaging false positives or any significant increase network latency .

Many alternative DDoS solutions on the market rely on off-site , cloud-based scrubbing technologies and take more than 10 minutes to activate the needed mitigation , Leslie said . By that time , an attack might already have done damage in terms of service downtime . SmartWall handles this on-premises so the process is much faster , drastically reducing the likelihood of service interruptions , he said .

Corero installed the SmartWall DDoS Protection platform within a matter of hours , and after about a week of testing Columbia Wireless had the system running on live traffic . SmartWall is installed between the ISP ’ s edge routers and its upstream providers ’ links .

“ We have a failover optical bypass installed with the Corero SmartWall system also so that in the event the SmartWall loses power or suffers a failure , it will failover so traffic can still route ,” Leslie said .

Previous page : Ben Leslie , CEO at Columbia Wireless

Because the protection system works in realtime and is always-on , it identifies and protects against any attacks which target the network daily . As the majority of DDoS attacks are now relatively small and short in duration but , can