What is a DDoS Attack?

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks work by flooding a website’s servers, applications or other Internet-connected resources with unwanted traffic so they become unavailable. DDoS attacks attempt to disrupt operations using multiple computers (or compromised machines) and IP addresses to overwhelm a website or network with bogus traffic. DDoS attacks often exploit the overwhelming power of a botnet, which can consist of hundreds or hundreds of thousands of infected machines located around the world.

DDoS attacks are typically performed by cybercriminals, hacktivists, online malcontents and mischief-makers, and even business competitors. If someone decides to knock your organization offline, the cost per hour to your business can range from $5,000 to $100,000, according to an Incapsula report.

DDoS attacks have increased in number and strength during the last several years. A 2016 report by Arbor® Networks states that nearly 125,000 DDoS attacks occurred each week during a recent 18-month period. According to a VeriSign study of attack sizes, 87% of DDoS attacks peaked over 1Gbps and 52% peaked over 5Gbps. DDoS attacks have also grown in duration, according to Kaspersky Lab’s research. In the first quarter of 2015, the longest DDoS attack lasted eight days. By the second quarter of 2016, the record had reached 12 days.

What is Rackspace DDoS Protection and Mitigation?

DDoS protection and mitigation is a system of practices and technologies that can help protect you from being knocked offline by DDoS attacks. Using a hardware-based protection system, our security specialists monitor traffic and respond to incidents by diverting your traffic through our mitigation system.

How Can Rackspace Help?

Battle-tested Systems

Rackspace®DDoS Mitigation Service is a battle-tested, hardware-based protection system that uses two different alerting technologies to identify a DDoS attack and eliminate the unwanted traffic — so your site remains operational.

Multi-layer Protection

We provide multi-layer DDoS protection without changes to your architecture. We identify your network’s normal behavior, then run all of your traffic through our DDoS mitigation system to detect any suspicious or unusual web traffic.

Subscription Service

Our proactive 12-month subscription service continuously monitors your systems against possible attacks and provides custom rules that trigger automatic mitigation — the moment an attack is recognized.

On-Demand Service

If a DDoS attack is already underway, our on-demand service can safeguard the IP addresses that are under fire, halting the onslaught in its tracks and preventing suspicious or unusual web traffic from reaching your site.