How UPX managed to block over 200 Gbps of DDoS attacks

The company

Global data center offering cloud solutions and collocation through a dedicated server. HostDime has been in Brazil for 15 years, where it runs its proprietary Tier III infrastructure, besides operating Tier I infrastructures in 7 other countries. Its customer portfolio spans several industries, such as news portals, e-commerce, education and health services.

Background

In February 2022, HostDime network received massive, high-volume DDoS attacks with complex and sophisticated profiles. The data center service became unavailable to several clients, who felt the impact on websites and other applications – which confirms the intent of the distributed denial-of-service attack.

Challenge

HostDime quickly contacted UPX. Due to such a severe scenario, an emergency activation of DDoS Defense was executed – UPX’s anti-DDoS solution. A channel was immediately created between HostDime’s Network team and UPX’s Engineering and Security team.

A major challenge for HostDime was to find a truly effective solution, capable of fully mitigating a complex volumetric attack, and with available and immediate service, since the peak of the attacks occurred during Brazilian carnival festivities.

Solution

At UPX, in addition to fast service and 24/7 support, HostDime finds complete monitoring in implementing new forms of mitigation for the suitability of an environment with various ecosystems, such as web page, SaaS and game servers, as well as diagnostic analysis and user feedbacks.

Upon enabling mitigation, a specific IP was identified under attack at 6.08 Gbps, with a rate of 819,832 packets per second of the TCP type. An attack such as this is more than enough to overcome an edge firewall.

Also, on the first day of the DDoS Defense run, UPX stopped attacks with over 1 million packets per second (1Mpps). And that was not the largest attack. A few days later, UPX mitigated the largest volume of attacks received by HostDime, with 204.12 Gbps and duration of almost 24 hours, with several types of attack protocols: IP, UDP, SSDP, UDP-QUIC, TCP, TCP+SYN, DNS and SNMP.

Over first 50 days, UPX worked on the mitigation of more than 200 DDoS attacks targeting HostDime, ensuring full network availability and stability and avoiding loss in performance or impacts to their end clients.

“We had tested several DDoS attack protection services, but none delivered the 3 fundamental pillars: effective protection, functional dashboard and fast and effective technical support. UPX was the only one that managed to masterfully deliver, and we are now satisfied customers!”

Filipe Mendes, CEO at HostDime