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ZENEDGE Debuts Always-On DDoS Protection, Sees Benefit For Crypto Exchanges

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:50 PM
Lester Coleman
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:50 PM

ZENEDGE, a provider of cloud-based, artificial intelligence driven web application firewall and DDoS cybersecurity solutions, announced the availability of ZENEDGE Single IP Protection, delivering enterprise-class network DDoS mitigation to organizations with less than a class C subnet.

Traditional network DDoS protection leverages Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to determine routing decisions. An inherent limitation of routers requires a minimum of a class C subnet (254 usable, 256 total IP addresses) for BGP configurations to work. ISPs (upstream) will not accept advertisements of a smaller subnet, except under special circumstances, said Leon Kuperman, company CTO.

This requirement limits organizations with smaller networks consisting of less than 256 IP addresses from leveraging network DDoS mitigation, said Kuperman.

Leveraging ZENEDGE Single IP protection, all organizations, regardless of the size of their networks, can be better prepared for DDoS attacks, ensuring availability while minimizing downtime and any negative impact to their brand and finances.

A Preventive Approach

“ZENEDGE prevents DDoS from affecting our customers,” Kuperman told CCN.com. “So while the event is ongoing, our clients remain up, and their business continues to run unimpeded. Usually, within a short period of time, the attacker recognizes that there is no impact from their launched DDoS attack and they stop.”

While ZENEDGE does not currently have any blockchain customers, Kuperman has followed the DDoS attacks on bitcoin exchanges, and he believes ZENEDGE could prevent such attacks.

“We have been following these attacks closely,” Kuperman said. “Many of these bitcoin providers are located in China, which makes mitigation somewhat challenging as attacks often originate from China and Russia as well. Attacks against bitcoin exchanges are designed to drive up the price of bitcoin, and these attacks are performed to game the market.”

DDoS Attacks Vary

“Attacks also range from low-level infrastructure attacks to higher level application attacks which are often the most disruptive,” he continued. “It is the latter type of attack (Layer 7) that we believe will grow in complexity and will be a challenge to mitigate going forward, especially for companies that have attempted to bring DDoS mitigation capabilities in-house rather than working with specialists in the DDoS field. ZENEDGE would have absolutely helped to protect these organizations, especially with complex attacks where breaches were attempted in tandem.”

Why DDoS Is On The Rise

DDoS attacks are increasing for the following reasons, according to Kuperman:
1) Online transaction processing is becoming increasingly critical each day. A DDoS, when effective, can bring down critical services and demand ransom to stop the attacks.
2) Bandwidth is becoming cheaper, and malicious bots are well connected. This means they can generate much more traffic than previously.
3) Criminals are becoming more sophisticated, well organized and well funded. They leverage DDoS as a means to an end.
4) Hactivism often leverages DDoS as a way to deliver messages effectively. When a major site is down, many pay attention.
5) DDoS is often used as a diversionary tactic in a more complex attack such as an advanced persistent threat. Attackers will use the chaos created with DDoS to breach servers and databases. They are then able to extract large amounts of data without being noticed.
6) With the growth of IoT, attackers will now have potentially billions of devices at their disposal to carry out DDoS.

With ZENEDGE Single IP Protection, organizations with smaller networks will be able to take advantage of robust network DDoS mitigation previously only available to large networks.

How It Works

Organizations that want to take advantage of ZENEDGE Single IP Protection will be assigned a DDoS-protected IP address range from the ZENEDGE IP pool. A GRE tunnel will be established to route traffic between the organizations’ servers and the ZENEDGE protected IP network. Finally, a simple DNS change will advertise the new DDoS protected IP addresses to the world. All incoming traffic will then flow through ZENEDGE’s network, ensuring an always-on, DDoS protected environment.

“ZENEDGE serves many gaming companies, SaaS providers and organizations who are hosting their solutions in a co-located data center or in the cloud,” said Kuperman. “While these organizations operate smaller networks and don’t control their routers, they are nevertheless consistently targeted with volumetric DDoS attacks.”

ZENEDGE Single IP protection is a solution for organizations such as gaming companies that leverage proprietary protocols, UDP, VPN, or non-standard TCP ports. The solution is designed to operate in a distributed mitigation environment, ensuring minimal latency impact.
In some situations, cloud-based architecture can be less susceptible to DDoS attacks, Kuperman noted.

Also read: Bitcoin developers: DDoS fix is ready

Cloud Brings Benefits

“Cloud-based architecture for applications does allow for highly distributed systems,” he said. “That is, an application (website) can be hosted in the U.S., South America, Canada, the EU, Asia Pacific, etc., all at the same time.”

“The great thing about blockchain is that it’s designed to be highly distributed,” Kuperman said. “Cryptocurrency and blockchain exchanges should absolutely take advantage of this architectural feature and distribute their operations. In that way, even if a regional datacenter goes down, others are up and running. Attackers have a much harder time bringing down fully distributed and redundant systems, which can be achieved by leveraging cloud.”

“Not all organizations build their applications this way of course,” he added. “ZENEDGE can help organizations design a highly distributed, DDOS protected network topology.”

ZENEDGE was founded in 2014 and launched its platform in 2015. ZENEDGE Single IP Protection is currently available. Pricing starts at $3,000/month for a block of 10 DDoS protected IPs.

Featured image from Shutterstock.