The initial DDoS attack caused performance issues on multiple Henyep trading websites for 24 hours. Company management did not respond to the DDoS attackers’ demand for a ransom in exchange for ending the attack, and instead engaged Prolexic. The company’s mitigation engineers restored access to all services on the sites within minutes after routing traffic through Prolexic’s global scrubbing centers where malicious traffic was removed.

Prolexic DDoS mitigation engineers in the U.S. quickly identified the initial attack as a SYN flood followed by multiple GET floods. The attack campaign peaked at 35.30 Mbps (bits per second), 8.10 Kpps (packets per second), and 122.00 Kconn (connections per second) over two days. Prolexic mitigation engineers were monitoring the attacks and counteracting the perpetrator’s changing attack vectors throughout the campaign. As a result, the attackers were unable to take down the Henyep site, nor disrupt services despite the length of the attack.

Recently, DDoS attackers tried to take down Henyep’s trading operations again with a 30 Mbps ICMP flood and GET flood without success due to Prolexic DDoS protection. Throughout 2012, Henyep, like many other financial services companies, has continued to be the target of DDoS attackers, but Prolexic’s DDoS mitigation services have prevented any downtime.

According to data published last week in Prolexic’s Q4 2012 Global DDoS Attack Report, financial services, e-Commerce and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies were targeted with high bandwidth DDoS attacks in excess of 50 Gbps in the fourth quarter. Over the three-month period, Prolexic logged more attacks than ever before against its global client base and predicts the scale and diversity of DDoS attacks will continue to increase. A complimentary copy of the report is available for download at www.prolexic.com/attackreports.