May 6, 2009

Black Lotus feature in Gawkwire

Filed under: Marketing — Tags: , , — admin @ 2:26 am

Source Gawkwire.com

Prevent DDoS Attacks with Black Lotus

Dave Young 05 May, 2009 06:35:00

Have a server or a website? Are they protected from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks? If you have a server or a website and they are important to your organization, you need to do everything you can to protect them from major DDoS attacks. Meet Black Lotus (http://www.blacklotus.net).

“Every site and server is inherently vulnerable to DDoS,” says Jeffrey Lyon, president of Black Lotus. “Employing your own countermeasures or using a DDoS protection provider only enhances your chance of survival.”

About Black Lotus
Black Lotus offers a proxy service specifically designed to protect your server even if you are hosting with another provider. DDoS protected proxy service can be setup quickly to screen and mitigate malicious traffic before handing it off to a customer’s server. “Our product differs from the competition as it is significantly lower cost and completely screens the request before handoff ensuring that there is absolutely no accidental leakage of attack traffic,” says Lyon. “Now we have the ability to immediately stop affiliate spam by shutting down spam offenders within the proxy itself.”

The company also offers a lightweight version of the proxy product for customers who want to screen requests for malicious behavior such as SQL/XML attacks.

Get a server, get DDoS protection
Black Lotus offers managed website hosting and both managed and unmanaged dedicated servers. “Generally, when a customer contacts us we recommend a server package with full management as this will allow us to evaluate and mitigate threats at both the network and server level,” says Lyon. “Server packages also offer the most bang for your buck when it comes to sheer power and protection.”

Get more with a seal
Black Lotus offers a DDoS Protection verification seal program identifying that a website is protected from DDoS attacks “The seal program is incredibly important in the DDoS protection business since a lot of claims made by providers range from somewhat frivolous to outright scams, ” says Lyon.

DDoS protection starting at $35 a month
Many companies try to take advantage of customers who need DDoS protection services with prices ranging from $5,000 to $11,000. More customers are discovering more affordable, leading services such as Black Lotus. “We actually operate two brands. The Black Lotus brand has 1 Gbps protection packages starting at $229.00,” adds Lyon. “We also have our BLCC Gold brand  for as low as $35 per month.

DDoS protection for everyone
The advantages and needs for DDoS protection services are becoming more obvious. “Initially, DDoS protection was only something that those involved with IRC or some type of dubious activity might need,” says Lyon. “Around 2000 – 2003, we began seeing legitimate businesses seeking protection.

Getting started with DDoS protection services
Getting started is incredibly easy. When a customer sends an inquiry to sales@blacklotus.net, Black Lotus DDoS technicians respond promptly to ensure customers get the answers and information they need to keep their websites and servers protected. Visit http://www.blacklotus.net to learn more.

April 13, 2009

True size of a DDoS attack?

Filed under: Industry Talk — Tags: , , — admin @ 11:24 am

So your provider calls and tells you “You’re receiving a 10 Gbps DDoS attack, we’re going to have to null route your IP until it passes.” Really?! Maybe they told you that you could upgrade to a protection plan to stop this attack. It might cost you $20.00, $1000.00, or maybe even $20,000.

Stop and ask your self: “Is this legitimate?” Every day Black Lotus receives e-mails from customers stating that they’re under a 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps DDoS attack. Once we even had someone swear they had 50 – 100 Gbps attacks. Where are our customers getting this information? If we were gambling men (and women) I would say they’re either making it up or someone else put it into their heads. Perhaps a competitor told them this to beat the heat of having to explain that they’re not a protected provider or that the protection they offer is inadequate.

So what is the true size of a DDoS attack and the cost of protecting against it? Here at Black Lotus only a few hundred dollars will be enough to stop a 1 Gbps or 500,000 packet per second attack (compare to $1500 to $11,000 elsewhere).  This is where a typical sales conversation may spin into, “Only 1 Gbps? I need more, my provider says i’m receiving 10 Gbps.” In the real world attacks of this size cost five to six figures to mitigate and generally cause severe disruptions across the internet that would have the global network engineering communities up in arms and at the ready. People on NANOG would be talking about it.

“Respectfully sir, I don’t believe you are,” we may reply. Why? It has been our experience in the past six years of focusing on DDoS protection that relatively few attacks burst past 1 Gbps. A typical attack against 99% of web sites might top out at 200 – 300 Mbps. Once in a blue moon a customer will make enemies with some seriously dangerous persons resulting in a 1 – 3 Gbps attack. We even had a potential customer just the other day claim one of our competitors was stopping these phantom 10 – 20 Gbps attacks on a routine basis at $250.00 per month. I wish they were, I really do that way I could just buy service from them and resell it instead of investing thousands into our own infrastructure and human capital.

At the end of the day if a provider tries to tell you that you need more than a couple Gbps of protection or that they’re going to sell you 10 – 20 Gbps of protection at something less than four to six figures then we will leave you with this: You’re probably the victim of a scam.