Attack Mitigation Frequently Asked Questions

What is a DDoS attack?

A DDoS attack is an attempt to take a website or internet service offline by way of sending malicious traffic. This traffic may be intended to either saturate the receiver, or take advantage of weak protocol semantics or limitations.

What is Clean Bandwidth?

Clean Bandwidth is the bandwidth used after attack traffic is removed, i.e the real traffic to your website. We do not ever bill for attack traffic.

Why don't you offer "Unlimited" mitigation?

Very little in this world is actually unlimited, least of all network capacity or the processing capacity of filtering hardware deployed. While some may don this word to describe their service what it usually translates to is "no guarantees".

What is a Nullroute?

A nullroute is a networking term used to describe the removal of the route to your IP from the global routing table. In laymans terms, anyone attempting to connect to your IP address is unable to as there are no instructions available as to where to deliver the traffic. This renders your website or service offline until the nullroute is removed.

I am nullrouted. What now?

If you have been nullrouted for exceeding the protection available in your account, your IP address (or one of your IP addresses) will be offline for a period of time until we are sure the attack has ceased. Usually Nullrouted IPs are checked every hour, in some cases it may be reduced to every 3 hours or increased to every 20 minutes.

I see limits for bandwidth, what is your limit for Layer 7 attacks?

At this time we have no specific limits for Layer 7 attacks in terms of requests/second.

Can you filter attack type X?

Yes, a non exhaustive list of some of the common attacks we mitigate can be found here.

Frequently Asked Questions