DOSarrest DDoS Protection: Overview and Analysis

See our complete list of top DDoS vendors.

Company Description

Founder Mark Teolis conceived DOSarrest as a result of his years of experience in the hosting/colocation industry. He saw firsthand the devastation that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks had, not only on the target but also on the service providers hosting the target, and he understood the need to handle attacks outside of the data center. He created the privately held company in 2007.

Product Description

DOSarrest is all about stopping DDoS attacks. It is focused on HTTP/HTTPs and protecting websites, APIs and mobile application servers on TCP ports 80 and 443. It offers a fully managed cloud-based security solution, made up of DDoS protection, a web application firewall, a CDN for enhanced performance, website monitoring and support. All are integrated using its big data analytics engine. It also monitors websites outside its own network from 10 different locations around the globe. Additionally, it offers cloud-based global and local load balancing.

While many companies have recently noted a rise in the scale of attacks, DOSarrest has observed an increase in smaller, application-layer incursions.

“We have been seeing a shift from large volumetric attacks to smaller, more sophisticated application-layer attacks,” said Sean Power, senior application security architect, DOSarrest. “Most people don’t realize that a sophisticated 1 Mb/sec attack or less will take a website down, even large sites.”

That’s why the company advocates multiple approaches or layers for effective DDoS defense. Defending against volumetric attacks is very different from defending against application-layer attacks. Each approach has its own requirements. Power said the best defense includes one mitigation layer for volumetric attacks comprised of devices with large bandwidth and high-throughput capabilities. To defend against an application-layer attack, organizations need more intelligent systems capable of deep packet inspection and session tracking.

Markets and Use Cases

The company protects customers in the government, ecommerce, education, health, financial, gaming and media industries.

Metrics

Power said throughput is a misleading metric. It represents only one facet of one style of attack. Furthermore, he added, the numbers are calculated as best-case scenarios where the attack is perfectly distributed across the most robust parts of the defense. He prefers to track the number of attacks currently being mitigated and says his company can deal with a great many attacks simultaneously.

Intelligence

It utilizes machine learning as part of attack and anomaly detection.

Delivery

Cloud

Agents

The product uses agents.

Pricing

DOSarrest offers two fully managed plans starting from $700/month.