When the technical team at UAE-based daily deals website GoNabit noticed a massive spike in traffic, they knew it wasn't coming from legitimate requests. They soon discovered that the traffic was due to a malicious attack. The company's bandwidth and system resources were being chewed up, preventing customers from accessing their website.
The attackers weren't targeting customer data or the company's source codes. However, the attack was proving just as malicious, damaging GoNabit's reputation and portraying them as unreliable at an essential stage in the growth of their business, as well as a region still struggling to define e-commerce.
Unable to combat the attacks themselves, GoNabit contacted several large U.S. hosting partners. Two in particular claimed to have the necessary DDoS mitigation tools. However, neither of them was able to stop the attacks.
Several engineers recommended that GoNabit contact Prolexic. The company sent a message through Prolexic's emergency form, and received an immediate response.
Prolexic's mitigation strategy: Reroute and scrub
As a first step, Prolexic rerouted all of GoNabit's traffic through one of their scrubbing centers. Within two hours, Prolexic's team had mitigated the attacks and restored the site to full accessibility for GoNabit's customers.
Prolexic was able to identify:
- The type of attacks used—a hybrid Layer 7 attack with characteristics of both GET floods and SYN floods
- Multiple locations used in the attacks, including Asia, South America, Africa, Australia, and the United States
- The number of botnets used, which ranged from 95 to as many as 11,900 machines
After the initial mitigation, the malicious attacks against GoNabit continued for a week, with the attackers using variations in an attempt to break through. However, Prolexic supplied real-time site traffic monitoring and were able to instantly thwart new attacks with proprietary mitigation tools. Eventually, the attackers gave up.
GoNabit was so impressed with Prolexic's response to the situation, they signed up for ongoing protection for their growing business, and have enjoyed full uptime since.
The most powerful protection from DDoS attacks
Prolexic's reputation extends beyond engineers and technical teams. Even malicious hackers will often avoid attacking sites that are protected by Prolexic in favor of easier targets. The Apex Group is thrilled to partner with Prolexic, offering our clients the best DDoS mitigation available today.
