Fergie's Tech Blog

Denial of Service Attacks: Diverting Dangerous Traffic

Jessica Twentyman writes on FT.com:

When it comes to dealing with denial of service (DoS) attacks, Adrian Asher is an expert. As head of security at online gaming company BetFair, he has successfully thwarted numerous attempts to bring down the company's website with the vast floods of bogus traffic associated with DoS attacks - but the cost of that achievement, he says, has been considerable.

"We've invested huge amounts in security and availability, in everything we need to ensure that uptime for our site is as close to 100 per cent as possible," he says. "We've got multiple levels of firewall, enormous amounts of network bandwidth and numerous highly specialised devices designed to alert us to, and protect us from, denial of service attacks."

Mr Asher also has a "huge" team of in-house security specialists at his disposal, who spend their working lives analysing internet traffic, identifying deviations from the norm and dealing with them immediately. While he declines to say exactly how many people are in that team, he claims that it is bigger than IT security teams at some of the big banks he has worked at in the past.

posted by Fergie @ 7/17/2007 12:28:00 PM