Prolexic Technologies

Prolexic Technologies

Type	Privately held company
Industry	Information Technology & Services
Founded	2003
Headquarters	Hollywood, Florida, USA
Area served	Worldwide
Website	www.prolexic.com

Prolexic Technologies is a privately held American information technology and services company. The company's business is to protect Internet-facing infrastructures – such as e-commerce web sites – against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks at the network, transport, and application layers. Prolexic operates a cloud-based DDoS mitigation platform and a global network of traffic scrubbing centers. Real-time monitoring and mitigation services are provided from a 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC). Prolexic’s DDoS mitigation services make sites harder to take down via DDoS attacks.^[1]

Company history

The company was founded in 2003 to provide services to the online gambling industry. At that time, it was the industry that received the highest volume of DDoS attacks. The company currently protects clients in the following markets: airlines/hospitality, e-commerce, financial services, gambling, gaming, public sector, and Software as a Service. Sony is said to be a customer of the company.^[1][2]

Prolexic CEO Scott Hammock and President Stuart Scholly both joined the company in 2011.^[3]

In 2011, Prolexic said it secured Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) level 2 compliance certification from the PCI Security Standards Council, which would speed deployment of remediation for compliant organizations during encrypted Application Layer 7 DDoS attacks^[4].

In 2005, the company was named one of the 100 Hottest Private Companies in North America by Red Herring.^[5]

Financial history

In 2012 Baltimore private equity firm Camden Partners invested $6 million in the company, and American Trading and Production Corp invested $2 million as part of an $8 million Series B funding round.^[6] In the deal, Jason Tagler of Camden Partners joined the board of directors of Prolexic. Prolexic said it would use the Series B money to support staff and augment its network.

In 2012, the company reported that in 2011 it achieved profitability and a compound annual growth rate of 45%.^[7]

In 2011, Prolexic completed two financing rounds lead by Kennet Partners totaling in $15.9 million.^[6]

Partners

The company claims as partners BT Global Services, Datacraft, Grove IS, Internap, IP Converge, Level 3 Communications, NTT Europe, Preventia, and Telstra.^[8]

Services

Prolexic provides DDoS mitigation services. To do this, the company opened its first network traffic scrubbing center in North America in 2003, in Europe in 2005, and in Asia in 2007.^[9] In 2012, the company’s traffic scrubbing capability was in excess of 500 Gbps of bandwidth and comprised multiple carriers in a distributed global network.^[10]

Because many DDoS attacks are concerted efforts by sophisticated live attackers, Prolexic uses a combination of automated tools and human expertise as part of its services.^[11] In 2012, company said it had successfully stopped all DDoS attacks affecting its clients to-date, including attacks against application servers, such as Layer 4 (SYN floods) and Layer 7 attacks^[12], as well as GET flood attacks^[13], zero-day attacks^[14], UDP/ICMP floods, TCP flag abuses, DNS reflection, and DNS attacks. Prolexic is said to have mitigated the largest DDoS attack of 2011, which involved 250,000 computers infected with malware.^[15]

The company’s service typically mitigates attacks within 5 to 20 minutes after a client’s network traffic starts flowing through a scrubbing center.^[10] Prolexic mitigated more than 30,000 DDoS attacks from 2003 - 2011.^[10] In 2011, Prolexic mitigated from 10 to 80 attacks daily.^[10]

The company provides three kinds of services to its clients:^[16]

• Monitoring services that detect attacks. One monitoring service includes direct flow-based monitoring of a client’s network routers. Another service places monitoring tools at a client’s site to detect application layer attacks.
• Mitigation services that intercept attacks. One such mitigation service from Prolexic reroutes a client’s network traffic to Prolexic’s cloud-based platform when an attack is detected. Another maintains an always-on physical connection to Prolexic’s platform. A third service changes a client’s DNS to redirect network traffic through Prolexic’s platform – this is the approach the company uses to quickly intercept an ongoing attack against a new client.
• Insight into DDoS attacks for partners and the public. Prolexic tracks global DDoS attacks and publishes a report each quarter.^[15] These reports are available to the public. In addition, Prolexic aggregates intelligence information from multiple sources and shares reports detailing active botnets and fraud-linked IP addresses with its partners.

DDoS mitigation

In 2012, hacktivism and vandalism were cited as the main inspiration for DDoS attacks, rather than extortion as in the past. This type of motivation is said to make any company a victim, not just high-profile organizations.^[17] Organizations of all sizes are said to be at risk of DDoS attacks, because the newer application-level attacks are more targeted than classic DDoS botnet attacks and don’t need as many resources to deploy.^[18] The cloud-based DDoS mitigation approach used by Prolexic employs technology to redirect traffic to the company’s DDoS mitigation service, scrub the traffic, and send only legitimate traffic to the client site. This attack mitigation approach is said to be lower-cost than the traditional approach of a company maintaining its own network firewall, making DDoS attack prevention an option for most firms doing business on the web.^[18]

See also

• Denial-of-service attack

References

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External links

• Prolexic home page