Blaze DDoS Protection
Blaze DDoS Protection
Blaze DDoS Protection mitigates the risk of a Distributed Denial of Service attack disrupting business by flooding your system with fake traffic that crashes your network, service, or servers.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become more prevalent in recent years, particularly in relation to criminal demands for payment to cease an attack. Blaze DDoS Protection service helps mitigate the risk, enabling business to continue uninterrupted.
Why DDoS Attacks are Hard to Mitigate
DDoS attacks create a tsunami of network activity to overwhelm web servers and systems.
Mitigation by traditional methods is difficult, not only because of the time taken to detect an attack and then mitigate against it, but also because most responses in stress situations involve cutting internet traffic (interrupting business operations) for a period of time. Furthermore, cybercriminals often try to provoke maximum stress on their victims by instigating multiple short (under 1 hour) attacks at random time intervals with escalating scope and intended impact.
This, together with additional variations in the exact methods used and choice of target systems, are all designed to maximise business disruption and stress among business leadership, encouraging victims to pay (where this is the goal). Additionally, the distraction caused by a DDoS attack among security and networking teams (and the wider business) can also be a prelude to even more pervasive and damaging cyber-attacks which are initiated when the victim’s teams are occupied trying to mitigate the DDoS attack.
The Solution to DDoS Attacks
Blaze has partnered with Lumen to deliver Blaze DDoS Protection as part of our cybersecurity services. Lumen is one of the world’s largest ISPs and a $20 Billion company (formerly known as CenturyLink) with specialist DDoS mitigation expertise and technology. Lumen operates what is arguably the largest IP backbone network in the world today with unparalleled global internet peering connectivity. Blaze DDoS Protection leverages Lumen’s DDoS mitigation technology and massive global backbone network which has upwards of 80 Tbps total attack ingestion capability.
What is a DDoS Attack?
A DDoS cyberattack aims to crash a network, service, or server by flooding the system with fake traffic. The sudden spike in messages, connection requests, or packets overwhelms the target’s infrastructure and causes the system to slow down or crash. During a DDoS attack the system cannot process genuine user requests, services become unavailable, and the target company suffers prolonged downtime, lost revenue, and dissatisfied customers.
There are a few types of DDoS attack but in many ways Volumetric DDoS attacks are the most troublesome to defend against. Because of this, volumetric attacks are the most common type of DDoS threat. In a volumetric attack, the attacker employs botnets to use a very large number of malware-infected devices to generate an overwhelming number of messages to the target system, sent from a correspondingly very large number of IP addresses.
DDoS Traffic Scrubbing with Ultra-Low Additional Latency
Blaze DDoS Protection works alongside the high security gateway from the internet onto the Blaze Private Core Network which itself constantly monitors all traffic to and from the internet for potential problems.
Whenever a DDoS attack is detected, mitigation is engaged and the relevant traffic is directed to Lumen’s advanced Scrubbing Centres (SCs). Only clean, scrubbed traffic is passed back through the Blaze Private Core Network and on to the customer.
In the background, Lumen also culls data from across the Lumen IP backbone, giving it tremendous depth to the field of vision when it comes to emerging and evolving cyber threats. This enables pro-active steps to neutralise and/or “take down” C2 (botnet command and control) servers involved with DDoS attacks, keeping the network and Blaze customers’ networks safe by preventing C2s from operating on the network.
Lumen collects 114 billion NetFlow records each day, allowing it to capture over 1.3 billion security events daily and to monitor for 5,000 known C2 (botnet command and control) servers on an ongoing basis.
By leveraging Lumen’s technology whenever a DDoS attack is detected, a Blaze DDoS Protection customer experiences ultra-low additional latency on the traffic being scrubbed. This is estimated at 1 milliseconds latency in peacetime conditions, based on experience from UK customers.
This solution, in contrast to alternative mitigation measures, enables the customer to continue to get clean internet traffic and continue normal business operations uninterrupted – even though the DDoS attack is ongoing.
A DDoS Protection Platform that Enables Intelligent Scaling
Intelligent, Resilient Architecture
Resilience is assured by “Anycast” announcements from the SC’s – If a Scrubbing Centre should fail, traffic would route to the next nearest SC.
The DDoS platform features an advanced intelligent architecture of Regional and Super Scrubbing Centres (17 SCs): Traffic is scrubbed as close to ingest as possible using Lumen owned and maintained equipment. A typical attack emanates from several geographically dispersed points and would enter the Lumen network through several peering points. For instance, any attack traffic emanating from the West Coast of the US would be attracted and scrubbed at Los Angeles.
Deployment of Enhanced Network-Based Protection Capabilities
BGP Flow spec is deployed across the entire Lumen global backbone network, delivering an unmatched capability to combat volumetric attacks on behalf of Blaze clients.
This technology means that if for any reason the scrubbing infrastructure is at risk of being overwhelmed by targeted attacks against its infrastructure (or the end client) if necessary, Lumen’s Security Operations Centres can intervene and rapidly invoke Flow spec rules to rate limit or block attacks across all peering connections across the network – before those attacks even reach their scrubbing centres.
The technology allows Lumen’s entire backbone network to be used to ingest attacks on behalf of clients – giving upwards of 80 Tbps of total attack ingestion capability. In so doing, an additional layer of mitigation is provided against large scale volumetric layers 3 and 4 attacks, upstream from the Scrubbing Centres.
Business Uninterrupted: Dependable, Automated, and Cost-Effective DDoS Mitigation
Blaze DDoS Protection has been designed as a highly effective solution which avoids the need to suspend internet connectivity or interrupt business services during DDoS attacks. The solution combines Lumen’s DDoS technology with the cybersecurity protections provided by the Blaze Core Network and the Blaze Network Operations Centre and Service Desk. The service provides important protection against the business impact and financial demands of DDoS-based attackers.
Partners
We partner with leading manufacturers like Microsoft, Fortinet, Veeam, Bitdefender, Cisco, Lenovo and other industry-leaders.
In doing so, Blaze have access to a vast array of products that allow us to overcome our customers’ business challenges and requirements.
Microsoft
Blaze is a Microsoft Solutions Partner and Tier 1 Microsoft CSP Partner. We specialise in Microsoft 365 (including Teams and Teams Phone System), in Microsoft On-Premise and Hosted / Cloud Infrastructure (including Azure), and enable businesses to continue their digital evolution by fully exploiting the latest capabilities of Microsoft products as they evolve.
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work, Blaze has demonstrated a broad capability to help customers boost productivity and make the shift to hybrid work using Microsoft 365.
Fortinet
Blaze is an Expert Partner of Fortinet, a global industry leader in the supply of secure networking infrastructure systems. Fortinet are our technology partner of choice when building customer-specific Private SD-WANs, and Blaze is one of only a handful of Fortinet SD-WAN Specialization Partners in the UK and a Fortinet top-level Expert Partner. Blaze is also a Fortinet-accredited Managed Secure Solutions Provider (MSSP) and Integrator Fortinet partner. A Leader in several of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants, the Fortinet platform combines excellent performance with advanced security features, superb manageability, and excellent Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) per Mbps.
Veeam
Veeam is a highly respected leader in cloud-based backup and recovery software, data protection and advanced monitoring in the data centre.
Blaze is a Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Silver Partner and we have combined Veeam technology with our highly secure Blaze Cloud™ infrastructure to produce BlazeVault™, a highly dependable, secure, and resource-efficient solution which will keep downtime to an absolute minimum in the event of data loss in operational systems or ransomware attack.
Bitdefender
Blaze is a Bitdefender Gold MSP Partner. Bitdefender is a global cybersecurity leader protecting over 500 million systems through OEM technology partnerships, including with many global IT companies. Tests show it is unmatched in Attack Prevention. Based on Bitdefender technology, Blaze Endpoint Protection hardens endpoints to prevent malware and malicious attacks, and it provides the investigation and remediation capabilities needed to dynamically respond to security incidents when they evade protection controls. Blaze Managed EDR keeps your organisation safe with 24×7 security monitoring, advanced attack prevention, detection and remediation.
Cisco
Cisco has long been the world’s pre-eminent network systems vendor, particularly for technology used at the core of major corporate networks and the internet. In addition to using Cisco equipment within our customers’ private networks, Blaze incorporates Cisco technology into the heart of our own network operations; the Blaze Private Core Network is built utilising Enterprise-class CISCO core routing equipment.