Bank Thwarts Merciless DDoS Attack
Ingenuity and rapid response were key to mitigating attack and restoring network access before reputational damage could occur
Bank customers have come to expect convenient online access to their accounts and various services any time of the day or night. Interruptions to banking networks are not just bad for business: they’re devastating to a financial institution’s reputation. For one multinational bank based in Africa, a unrelenting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which was suspected to be part of a larger coordinated campaign against the financial sector in sub-Saharan Africa, necessitated geo-blocking on the bank’s network to stop the intrusion. As a result, banking customers were cut off from the rest of the world.
Because neither of the bank’s two ISPs had sufficient DDoS mitigation capabilities, they were ill-equipped to withstand this sophisticated volumetric attack, which targeted the carriers’ web services infrastructure. Once the bank’s NetOps and SecOps staff recognized the institution was under attack, they researched DDoS mitigation options. This brought them to the Arbor Cloud DDoS mitigation service and the Arbor Cloud emergency provisioning service from NETSCOUT. Over the course of a weekend, NETSCOUT worked nonstop to put the necessary systems in place, repurposing a decommissioned server to save valuable time, immediately halting the attack, and putting DDoS identification and mitigation measures in place to stop future attacks.