Internet post COVID

Internet capacity requirements and security issues skyrocketed for Australian businesses and those around the globe during the COVID-19 breakout.  The video discusses the 350% increase in DDoS attacks in a 30-day period, and how iseek’s prevention system kept its customers data safe and running business as usual.

Transcript:

Jason Gomersall

“So, what we found in the 30 days after COVID-19 hit here in Australia is that our customers, across the board, are needing significant increases to their regular internet capacity – I believe this is to facilitate their people now working from home and accessing the corporate network.

30 days after COVID-19 hit we saw a 24% increase in internet capacity requirements for our customers, a figure that is in line with the NBN nationally across the board.”

Josh Atterbury – Head of Technology, Customer and Cloud

“The iseek internet is put together using a combination of domestic and international peerings, so we have 7 international peering points and 14 domestic peering points, and what that does is allows us to provide a consistent highly redundant service to our customers.

In terms of bandwidth or general capacity, those peering points equate to about 100 gig of upstream data.

iseek’s internet service is DDoS protected, a service preventing hackers or attackers taking down websites and preventing legitimate people from accessing them. It’s built using a system of in-bound and out-bound devices.

The in-bound devices sit in-path, and what they do is monitor the traffic that’s coming through our internet pipes, if they detect a DDoS attack they rear-out that traffic through the outer band system.

The out-bound system is significantly larger in capacity and is there to filter the DDoS traffic from legitimate traffic streams. That traffic will be forwarded onto the websites, so everyone who’s trying to access that site for legitimate reasons will be able to.

Over the last month we’ve seen 355 DDoS attacks on our clients, comparing it to the month just before that, there been a 350% increase in attacks during this period, quite a significant number.   The industry in general has seen an increase in attacks due to COVID related issues.

In the 355 attacks that we’ve seen in those 30 days, 95% of them have been under 10 minutes in duration –  so quite short lived – but even so, the traffic load is very high, accounting for a total of 7.25 terabytes of data that have come into our network trying to take down our customer systems that we’ve managed to filter.”