Prolexic recently announced that the Hong Kong-based, Global eSolutions has selected its DDoS detection and DDoS protection services. Prolexic is one of the premier providers of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services.

In a release, Stuart Scholly, Prolexic’s president, said that “Global eSolutions got caught up in the wave of DDoS attacks that flooded the online financial services industry in the early months of 2012. The large ransom received by one of the firm’s clients indicates that cybercrime against financial companies is only getting more serious and prevalent.”

An online foreign exchange (Forex) and Contracts for Difference (CFD) trading firm based in the U.K., and a client of Global eSolutions recently experienced a DDoS attack on its Forex trading website after a ransom demand from cybercriminals was ignored by the management. As soon as the attack was initiated, Layer 3 and Layer 4 volumetric floods disrupted the website’s availability for around four hours. The second layer of attack (Layer 7) took place after three weeks, which effectively cut off access to the trading platform to online traders.

Global eSolutions IT technicians first suspected and then detected the DDoS attack when they observed that the sessions and memory status of the firewall increased substantially over normal levels while the bandwidth consumption reached saturation. The technicians found more than 80,000 different IPs were trying to access the network.

Initially, the Global eSolutions IT technicians tried blocking some of the suspicious looking IPs. However, that did not help the matter, and the company then got two of its ISPs in Asia to black hole the traffic inflow to its site, effectively cutting off access to the Forex trading platform and other applications to most legitimate traders. This move caused considerable damage to the company’s reputation as well as the trust of its customers.

Post this attack, Global eSolutions selected Prolexic’s PLXrouted service to ensure comprehensive DDoS protection against future attacks to its Forex trading platform and other critical applications within its Internet facing infrastructure. In case the company still comes under a DDoS attack, the site’s traffic will be quickly routed to the cloud-based mitigation platform of Prolexic. Here all malicious traffic will be located and removed and clean traffic will be routed back to the site.

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