Global Logistics Company Employs DDoS Attack Management to Ensure Worldwide Package Delivery

Customer Profile

One of the largest courier and logistics companies in the world with locations in over 220 countries and territories worldwide, focusing on sea and air mail, delivers over 1.3 billion parcels per year and has 380,000 employees throughout the world. 

The Challenge

This organization had historically used multiple service providers to protect their globally distributed datacenters, depending on the regional availability of such services from the providers. They contacted NETSCOUT^® in 2019 to help them simplify their DDoS mitigation infrastructure by replacing the different service providers with one single provider-agnostic service that could also cover all global locations. This enabled them to have a single SLA with 1 company rather than the multiple-provider option, which was extremely difficult, complex and expensive to manage. In times of attack, an organization needs clarity and a consistent platform to protect themselves rather than different SLA’s with multiple vendors in all locations. Overall, the NETSCOUT Arbor Cloud Service was less expensive than the combined multi-service-provider solution, and with one single point of contact for delivery of the service and the mitigation of the attacks, it was with confidence they moved to NETSCOUT. Simply put, they found Arbor Cloud to be the preferable solution in the market. 

The Solution

The company fell victim to a series of complex targeted DDoS attacks at the end of December 2019, which spilled over into January 2020. A particular application service was impacted so much that it threatened to halt all the of the company’s flights from taking off worldwide affecting all packages to be delivered. 

They engaged with the NETSCOUT Account team and NETSCOUT was able to offer immediate cover with NETSCOUT Arbor Cloud. NETSCOUT Arbor Cloud SOC (Security Operations Center) reacted in “emergency mode” and mitigated the attacks. 

On the heels of that attack and primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they then recognized an increase in VPN traffic because of employees working from home accessing internal application via VPN. So now their newly refreshed Arbor Product Portfolio needed an upgrade to manage the escalation in traffic. So they added 6 x AED 2600s, 2 x 2800s and Cloud services to cope with the bandwidth overload. In addition, NETSCOUT provided a subscription license model for their AED and Cloud portfolio to ease the short-term pain in a cost-effective fashion. 

The Results

The increased DDoS management and mitigation capacity provides the organization and their employees using VPN confidence that they will be protected from DDoS attacks that can disrupt their business activity and even damage the organizations reputation while temporarily working from home. The organization was pleased with the flexibility of the AED license configuration and the ability of NETSCOUT to execute on a global procurement effort quickly and to the organization’s crisis timeline.