Nexusguard enlists Australian service providers for DDoS defences

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) provider Nexusguard will work to bolster Australia's DDoS defences by engaging with local service providers to offer branded remediation services to their customers, the company's global head of strategy explained as the firm prepared to open its first Australian office this month.

That office will see the company, which operates nine DDoS 'scrubbing centres' that filter attack traffic well before it gets near its targets, offering white-labelled DDoS-remediation services to Australian service providers to sell under their own brand names. A local scrubbing centre is also on the agenda.

The decision to open a local office was driven by Australia's growing profile as a global target for DDoS attacks. “Australia has always been on the map as far as the 10 most-attacked countries for DDoS,” Barry said, “but market need was pulling us to the west until now.'

Recently, however, the activity around Australian targets has picked up: just in the last week, Barry said the company's security researchers noted over 30 attacks on targets in Australia.

“This is abnormally high relative to the population,” he said. “There is definitely a buzz around DDoS surrounding Australia. In the past couple of years, the DDoS problem has grown into a mainstream problem for everybody – and as we enter Australia we are trying to address this in a thoughtful way.”

Recent figures suggested Australia was being pounded by DDoS attacks harder than the rest of the APAC region, with attacks lasting half as long as global averages but hitting twice as hard. This, amidst concerns that Australian companies are unprepared to deal with DDoS attacks – and the recent finding that Australia had become one of the world's top 10 sources of DDoS traffic for the first time ever.

Rapid growth in DDoS attacks had forced the industry to consider the best way for customers to deal with the attacks, Barry said, and service providers had stepped up to integrate the capabilities given their position upstream of the customer.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding regarding DDoS mitigation should be and whose responsibility it is,” he explained, adding that the rise of often-insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices had created new urgency around sorting out this issue because commercial botnets-for-hire had become so prevalent and easy to use that IoT devices were likely to be targeted and commandeered to launch DDoS and other attacks.

IoT manufacturers “really aren't paying attention to security,” he explained. The risk “is not just that the devices will be compromised, but that they will be compromised and added to a bot network. This is why we're trying to stay ahead of the game; having our own mitigation platform really helps us adapt and evolve in the changing landscape.”

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