A Highland-based telecoms provider has become one of the first in the UK to deploy an online security shield used to protect some of the largest global enterprises from cyber criminals as part of a £6.5million investment in its network.
HighNet revealed that in the first two weeks of using the system, capable of blocking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attempts, it had thwarted attacks “every couple of days,” including a major one on a customer in Aberdeen.
The Inverness headquartered firm, which manages more than 20,000 business lines throughout the UK, said the shield was necessary to combat growing levels of criminal online activity aimed at gaining entry to computer systems.
DDoS attacks involve a network of computers, known as a ‘botnet,’ which flood an IP address leaving legitimate traffic unable to get through. The system spots an attack starting, stops it entering the network and alerts HighNet’s engineers by e-mail.
The company’s network architect, Duncan Kennedy, said: “There are a number of attack strategies that are employed, but the most basic and common one is to swamp the target with traffic so that it’s too busy dealing to deal with legitimate business requests.” Mr Duncan added the attack on the Aberdeen business was one of the biggest so far on one it its customers. He added: “Most attacks we see are much smaller than this example, but in recent weeks we’ve started to see, and block, more of these high bandwidth attacks.”
