As DDoS attacks increase in power, Cloudflare expands its offerings
As distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks keep setting records, one of the companies that sells protection against them is expanding its product line to cover more than just web servers.
Cloudflare announced a new product called Spectrum that will protect email, remote access, gaming services and more.
“It’s DDoS protection for any box, container or [virtual machine] that connects to the internet,” the San Francisco company announced Thursday. “Whether it runs email, file transfer or a custom protocol, it can now get the full benefits of Cloudflare.”
This year has already seen record-breaking denial-of-service attacks, with reports of as much as 1.7 terabits per second of junk web traffic hitting one U.S. company’s servers in early March, not long after a separate 1.35 Tbps attack.
Google made a similar move in the DDoS protection market last month announced a suite of new security products for Google Cloud and G Suite customers including Cloud Armor, which is based on the technology used to protect Google Search, Gmail and YouTube.
It’s an increasingly crowded and competitive business — and a lucrative one, too, given that the cloud sectors of companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are among the most profitable divisions of each tech giant.
Cloudflare’s Spectrum has already been deployed by gaming companies like Hypixel, which runs the world’s biggest Minecraft server and dealt with a terabit-per-second DDoS from the Mirai botnet.
“Hypixel was one of the first subjects of the Mirai botnet DDoS attacks and frequently receives large attacks. Before Spectrum, we had to rely on unstable services and techniques that increased latency, worsening user’s experience,” Bruce Blair, the CTO at Hypixel, said as Cloudflare announced the new product. “Now, we’re able to be continually protected without added latency, which makes it the best option for any latency and uptime sensitive service such as online gaming.”
In addition to DDoS protection, Spectrum offers TLS termination — a method of dividing certain kinds of incoming web traffic, to speed up performance — and it integrates with Cloudflare’s IP Firewall.
