Defense.net Ensures All Your Base Are Not Belong To Them

If you’ve ever been on the business end of a denial of service attack, you know the sinking feeling you get when your servers fall to the enemy. Defense.net, a new project by cybersecurity expert Barrett Lyon is out to keep that from happening to their clients. Lyon also founded BitGravity and Prolexic and was featured in a book about his attempts to take down a Russian hacking group tied to the mafiya, Fatal System Error by Joseph Menn. So he’s legit.

Their first product is called DDoS SWAT and acts as a secondary DDoS mitigation service if your first one falls to the enemy. Because most financial and business organizations have their own servers in place, DDoS SWAT will pick up when those fail. The service provides “10 times as much bandwidth capacity” as most primary servers and they add in redundant data centers as well as a real anti-DDoS SWAT team that will handle things when they go pear-shaped.

The new company got $9.5 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

“Every week, at least one major bank has an outage to all or some of their users even though every major bank is protected by traditional DDoS mitigation companies,” said Defense.net CEO Chris Risley. “As an overflow service, Defense.Net DDoS SWAT has to do a lot more than match the capabilities and capacities of the primary provider. We’re only asked to step in when the primary provider is not succeeding. By definition, we’re stepping into a bad situation.”

The whole thing is obviously pretty nerdy but it does have a few cool features that everyone can appreciate. For example, Defense.net offers something called AttackView that shows you how and where you are being attacked and includes traffic diagnostics, attack origins, and how the attack is progressing based on the countermeasures applied. It also uses something called IP Reflection to route “clean” traffic around the junk and reduces latency to and from the attacked server.

As a fan of Neuromancer Defense.net looks pretty darn cool. Because it’s aimed at big businesses, however, don’t expect to plunk down a twenty dollar bill and get some SWAT team action on your personal blog. Until you’re Fortune 500 you have to depend on the old “buckle up and pray” model of DDoS mitigation.