News
Link11 offers free DDoS protection to public sector organizations
March 2020 by Marc Jacob
Link11 is offering its DDoS protection solutions free of charge to public sector health, government and public education organizations during the highly contagious phase of COVID-19.
Public sector organizations are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks, and the availability of critical public infrastructures is more important than ever as people look for genuine sources of information related to the virus outbreak. Governments all over the world have taken necessary actions to lower COVID-19’s spreading curve, including implementing remote working policies, resulting in significant growth in internet traffic, leading to an increased risk of social engineering, business email compromise, ransomware and DDoS attacks.
According to Link11’s research, during the three-week period Monday 17 February to Monday 9 March, Link11’s Security Operation Center (LSOC) defended 20,349 minutes of attacks (over 2,860 hours), which is more than 30% up compared to the 15,612 minutes of attacks mitigated during the same period in 2019.
Marc Wilczek, COO of Link11 said: “It takes only a small effort these days to overload servers and online services, and organizations need to protect their infrastructures. To help them deal with the evolving threat landscape, Link11 is offering government, public health and education organizations a solution that proactively identifies, blocks, and mitigates DDoS attacks within the Link11 Cloud Protection Platform, free of charge until September 2020.”
On Sunday 15 March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suffered a cyber-attack, designed to slow the agency’s services amid the government’s rollout of a response to coronavirus, with the aim of overloading HHS servers. Officials assume a hostile foreign actor was behind this campaign.
Traditional on-premise DDoS defenses, which are still widely used, and load-balancing products, are not able to protect individual websites, APIs or cloud applications against Layer-7 attacks, as these malicious data tsunamis can create big damage with little total bandwidth, bringing everything to a standstill instantly.
Cloud-based DDoS protection, such as Link11’s integrated Cloud Security Platform, uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, strict automation and real-time analytics to ensure cyber-resilience of the entire IT infrastructure and application landscape supporting hybrid as well as cloud-native deployments.
