ViewQwest launched their DDoS Protection Service that defends the networks of banks, e-commerce vendors, telcos and just about any business with an online presence against the increasingly malicious and debilitating DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks.
Powered by enterprise security specialist NSFOCUS, the new service aims to make premium-grade Internet security more affordable for businesses and even governments which are increasingly beefing up their IT infrastructure to defend against this rising Internet menace.
Increasingly, businesses and government in the region are going beyond getting plain-vanilla Internet access to “clean-pipes” which are premium Internet lines with built-in tech that can automatically identify malicious DDoS traffic in the networks and filter them to “scrubbing centres” to take away the nefarious packets before sending the good packets back to the user.
ViewQwest offers cloud-based and provider-based DDoS mitigation to all businesses. ViewQwest’s DDoS Protection Service starts from $699 per month, the most affordable in Singapore; meaning that the service is not dependent on the customer engaging ViewQwest as their service provider.
Vignesa Moorthy, CEO of ViewQwest, said: “Singapore is the regional hub for e-commerce and online services. With this partnership, we aim to offer premium-class DDoS mitigation to protect these websites at prices that they can afford to help boost Singapore’s position as the leading online services hub in this region.”
DDoS attacks – where hackers paralyse websites by overwhelming them with web traffic, often using an army of infected computers from all over the world - have become more frequent and destructive over the last few years. Experts believe that the DDoS attack on the BBC website at the end of last year may have been the largest recorded attack in history, hitting the 600Gbps mark.
Allan Thompson, COO of NSFOCUS said: “DDoS attacks are moving away from being just nuisance attacks to becoming a decoy that precedes more malicious attacks, such as stealing confidential information.”
DDoS attacks show no sign of slowing down because the barrier to entry to launch a DDoS attack is very low. DDoS attacks are not expensive to launch, costing as little as US$25 per hour for 1000 compromised computers to attack a single victim.
Attley Ng, Senior VP and GM of the Asia-Pacific market for NSFOCUS, said that while the company currently had a small presence in Singapore, he was expecting the company to grow exponentially as they began to engage more in the region and brought on more customers.