Arbor Solution Brief
DDoS Attacks in the
Gaming Industry
Customer
Leading European gaming company
Industry
Gaming
The Challenge
Detect and mitigate ongoing, persistent
and volumetric DDoS attacks
The Solution
Pravail® Availability Protection System
(“Pravail APS”)
The Result
Fewer DDoS attacks and dramatic
reduction in downtime before an
attack is detected and mitigated
Given its high-volume, high-transactional environment, the gaming industry must ensure
24/7 platform availability, 365 days a year. Any downtime has a significant financial and
reputational impact. This makes gaming companies especially sensitive to DDoS attacks
not only by hackers, but also by competitors and disgruntled clients.
What’s at Stake?
Consider the case of a leading European gaming company, which was experiencing a
series of DDoS attacks that caused significant losses in revenue. The attacks, ranging
from 300 Mbps to as much as 3.5 Gbps, would happen regularly on a Sunday afternoon.
Even though the company had a managed DDoS protection solution in place, valuable
time would elapse from the moment it realized that its platform was under attack until
the service started working again. By then, the company had already experienced costly
downtime, which, depending on how busy its servers were, amounted to anywhere from
£80,000 to £160,000 in lost revenue. With regular attacks, this could quickly turn into
millions of pounds of losses—not to mention irreparable brand damage.
Pravail® APS: A Winning Strategy
“Arbor’s Pravail APS provides
what other perimeter-based
security devices cannot,
and that is the ability to
proactively protect against
DDoS attacks.”
Richard Martinez, Enterprise Security
Analyst with Frost & Sullivan
In early 2012, the company invested in the Pravail® Availability Protection System
(“Pravail APS”), an on-premise DDoS mitigation solution developed by Arbor Networks®,
and saw immediate results. DDoS attacks no longer threaten the organization’s revenues.
That’s because Pravail APS delivers DDoS attack identification and mitigation capabilities
that can be rapidly deployed, even during an attack.
“Arbor’s Pravail APS provides what other perimeter-based security devices cannot, and
that is the ability to proactively protect against DDoS attacks,” said Richard Martinez,
enterprise security analyst with Frost & Sullivan. “Given the threat complexity and the
business impact of DDoS, a full-spectrum solution is required. A common response by
many administrators to the challenges of DDoS is the belief that their firewall and IPS
infrastructure will protect them from attack. Unfortunately, this is not true. Firewalls and
IPS devices, while critical to network protection, are not adequate to protect against
complex DDoS attacks.”
When a DDoS attack happens, the very first indicator that something is wrong is a
slowdown in performance. Thanks to the baseline of usual expected traffic designed by
Pravail APS, the gaming company is now able to immediately spot anomalies, leaving
less room for uncertainty as to what is happening.
The Bottom Line
Investing in Pravail APS has lessened the gaming company’s financial losses due to
DDoS attacks. Now the company can automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks
with little or no user interaction—before services are degraded. The solution also offers
the company simple fallback plans and resolution techniques when attacks cannot be
readily identified and mitigated to speed resolution. That said, Pravail APS is not a “black
box.” In addition to automated DDoS protection, Pravail APS provides real-time visibility
into attacks, blocked hosts and even packets—together with the flexibility to alter attack
countermeasures and thresholds if required.
Its investment in Pravail APS has also made the company less prone to DDoS attacks—
and sheds light on the way hackers choose their victims. When attackers target a
particular company, they continuously attack for a certain period of time, and then assess
whether their actions are causing any damage. It takes a lot of resources and coordination to perform these types of attacks, and once hackers realize their efforts do not have
any effect on the company, they abandon it and move on to another target. With marketleading DDoS defenses now in place, the gaming company is off the attacker’s “target
list” and now experiences far fewer DDoS attacks.
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reserved. Arbor Networks, the Arbor Networks
logo, Peakflow, ArbOS, Pravail, Arbor Optima,
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are all trademarks of Arbor Networks, Inc.
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SB/BLINDGAMING/EN/0913-LETTER
Arbor Networks, Inc. helps secure the world’s largest enterprise and service provider networks from DDoS
attacks and advanced threats. Arbor is the world’s leading provider of DDoS protection in the enterprise, carrier
and mobile market segments, according to Infonetics Research. Arbor’s advanced threat solutions deliver complete
network visibility through a combination of packet capture and NetFlow technology, enabling the rapid detection
and mitigation of malware and malicious insiders. Arbor also delivers market leading analytics for dynamic incident
response, historical analysis, visualization and forensics. Arbor strives to be a “force multiplier”, making network
and security teams the experts. Our goal is to provide a richer picture into networks and more security context—
so customers can solve problems faster and reduce the risk to their business. To learn more about Arbor products
and services, please visit our website at arbornetworks.com. Arbor’s research, analysis and insight, together with
data from the ATLAS global threat intelligence system, can be found at the ATLAS Threat Portal.