DDoS Mitigation Services at City Lifeline
Being in a good data centre does not stop malicious attacks from the Internet. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more common. The London data centre provides a service to all City Lifeline IP Transit customers to mitigate the effect of a DDoS attack.
A DDoS Attack
DDoS attacks are malicious and growing. The attacker may try to sabotage a web-based operation, to blackmail the operator or to extort money by denying legitimate customers web access. An attack is carried out by a number of computers each simultaneously making false web page requests to a server. Once the number of queued requests exceeds the ability of the server to deliver, the server can no longer receive genuine user requests. The web service has been denied to legitimate users by swamping the server with false requests.
Size of DDoS Attacks
Most DDoS attacks are quite small. A typical small commercial web service may be able to deliver 50 to 100 pages per second. More than that and the software saturates. For a very large commercial operations, such as a retail transactional website, an attacker may use (or rent from a criminal gang) a botnet comprising many thousands of computers to overwhelm the site.
City Lifeline DDoS Mitigation
DDoS attacks cannot be prevented, but their effects can be mitigated. The City Lifeline DDoS Mitigation Service is available to all users of City Lifeline IP Transit in the London data centre. There is no charge for its availability, only for its use.
How it Works
When a customer is attacked, he notifies the City Lifeline 24/7 Network Operating Centre. The NOC then reroutes all traffic sent to the affected customer IP addresses to an external Scrubbing Centre. False requests are dropped and valid requests are forwarded to the customer. When the attack ends, normal routing is re-established.
City Lifeline IP Transit with DDoS Mitigation
City Lifeline IP Transit not only gives you high quality multi-homed internet communications but allows you to react quickly and effectively to a DDoS attack. Nothing can stop an attack, but the DDoS Mitigation Service means you can minimize its effects and its cost to you.
