DDoS attacks occur every day. A successful attack leads to embarrassing downtime, extra costs and damaged reputations. For public organizations shouldering high expectations of accountability, this is an unacceptable level of risk, especially when DDoS services are cheaply available on the dark web.
Merit Network’s DDoS Protection Service makes sure your defenses are tight, and our service typically comes at a fraction of the cost of other mitigation services.
As a subscriber to this service, you’ll have the Merit Support Center watching your perimeter for you. When our team detects a threat, they reroute the bad traffic, scrub it and return the good traffic to your network.
What do you do as all this takes place? Nothing. And that’s the point. We send alerts to keep you updated, and notify you when it’s over. Services run uninterrupted, and your users don’t know anything happened.
We help thwart attacks. You maintain confidence in the protection of your network.
Merit as your ISP understands your traffic patterns better than anyone else, eliminating false positives, giving you worry-free DDoS protection 24x7x365. Let our security experts do the worrying for you. Contact us at 734.527.5785 or [email protected] to get started.
Download our Merit DDoS Protection sheet (PDF) to learn more.
UNDER ATTACK
The Merit Support Center (MSC) monitors traffic 24 hours a day. The network detection system establishes baselines for normal traffic activity, allowing it to spot attacks.
- During an attack, the MSC notifies your designated IT points of contact and seeks authorization to launch defensive maneuvers, known as mitigation. Subscribers also can choose the “always on” option, in which case the MSC does not need your authorization to begin mitigation.
- Traffic is rerouted to “scrubbers” that block and remove the bad traffic.
- The clean traffic exits the scrubbers and heads to your network.
- We monitor the situation until the event is over.
WHAT YOU SEE ON YOUR SIDE
- Your points of contact receive notification of an attack.
- Subscribers who’ve chosen the “always available” option are asked for authorization to mitigate. Subscribers who’ve selected the “always on” option are notified that mitigation is taking place.
- You receive updates along the way, including when mitigation is complete.
DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service
When launching a DDoS attack, hackers take advantage of vulnerabilities in the internet’s architecture. They coordinate hosts to deploy hundreds of thousands of bots. This lets them inflate the attack and inundate a network with traffic. The bogus traffic clogs your network. Sites go down. Internet access is blocked. Employees can’t access email and other critical cloud services. Attackers may be motivated by anything from grudges to greed. Merit’s many members in the education sector may be familiar with attacks launched on exam days. Our team also has seen online gaming feuds spill over into attacks on campuses. Attacks have become more effective, sophisticated — and cheap.
“DDoS attacks used to just be brute force, in your face, collateral damage,” says Kevin Hayes, Merit’s chief information security officer. “But now criminals use them tactically: as diversions while they steal your intellectual property, for example. These attacks have been commercialized to the point where someone with almost no technical expertise whatsoever can go onto the dark web, pay some cryptocurrency and say, ‘I would like an attack launched on this organization, or server, or IP address.’”
— Kevin Hayes, Chief Information Security Officer at Merit Network
QUESTIONS ABOUT DDoS?
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