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Prolexic Technologies was a US-based provider of security solutions for protecting websites, data centers, and enterprise IP applications from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks at the
network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...
,
transport Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land (rail and road), water, cable, pipeline, an ...
, and application layers. It operated a DDoS mitigation platform and a global network of traffic scrubbing centers. Real-time monitoring and mitigation services were provided by a 24/7 security operations control center (SOCC). Prolexic indicated its DDoS mitigation services make websites, data centers and enterprise IP applications harder to take down via DDoS attacks. In February 2014, cybersecurity and cloud services company Akamai Technologies acquired Prolexic Technologies.


History

In 2003 Prolexic Technologies was founded by
Barrett Lyon Barrett Gibson Lyon (born March 18, 1978) is an American Internet entrepreneur. Early life and education The son of a lawyer, Lyon was raised in Auburn, California. Although he initially struggled in school due to dyslexia, in middle school he ...
and was the subject of the book '' Fatal System Error'' by Joseph Menn. Prolexic protects organizations in the following markets: airlines/hospitality, e-commerce, energy,
financial services Financial services are the Service (economics), economic services provided by the finance industry, which encompasses a broad range of businesses that manage money, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance companies, acco ...
, gambling,
gaming Gaming may refer to: Games and sports The act of playing games, as in: * Legalized gambling, playing games of chance for money, often referred to in law as "gaming" * Playing a role-playing game, in which players assume fictional roles * Playing ...
,
public sector The public sector, also called the state sector, is the part of the economy composed of both public services and public enterprises. Public sectors include the public goods and governmental services such as the military, law enforcement, infra ...
, and
software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...
.
Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
is said to be a customer of the company. Prolexic claims some of the largest banks as its clients. In 2005, the company was named one of the 100 Hottest Private Companies in North America by ''Red Herring''. In 2011, Prolexic indicated it secured
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an information security standard used to handle credit cards from major card brands. The standard is administered by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council and its use i ...
(PCI DSS) level 2 compliance certification from the
PCI Security Standards Council The payment card industry (PCI) denotes the debit, credit, prepaid, e-purse, ATM, and POS cards and associated businesses. Overview The payment card industry consists of all the organizations which store, process and transmit cardholder data, ...
, which would speed the deployment of remediation for compliant organizations during encrypted Application Layer 7 DDoS attacks. In 2011 Prolexic CEO Scott Hammack and President Stuart Scholly both joined the company. Prolexic was acquired by Internet content delivery network Akamai Technologies in a $370 million deal completed in February 2014.


Financial history

In 2011, Prolexic completed two financing rounds led by Kennet Partners totaling $15.9 million. In 2012, the company reported that in 2011 it achieved profitability and a compound annual growth rate of 45%. In 2012 Baltimore private equity firm Camden Partners invested $6 million in the company, and American Trading and Production Corp invested $2 million as part of an $8 million
Series B A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the ...
funding round. In the deal, Jason Tagler of Camden Partners joined the board of directors of Prolexic. Prolexic said it would use the Series B money to support staff and augment its network. In 2013, Prolexic closed a US$30 million Series C funding round led by new investors Trident Capital and Intel Capital. Kennet Partners, Camden Partners and Medina Capital all took part in the funding round.


Partners

The company claims as partners BT Global Services, Datacraft, Grove IS,
Internap Internap Corporation ( Nasdaq ticker symbol: INAP) is a company that sells data center and cloud computing services. The company is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, United States, and has data centers located in North America, EMEA and the ...
, IP Converge, Level 3 Communications, Preventia, and
Telstra Telstra Group Limited is an Australian telecommunications company that builds and operates telecommunications networks and markets voice, mobile, internet access, pay television and other products and services. It is a member of the S&P/ASX 20 ...
.


Services

Prolexic provides three kinds of DDoS protection services to its clients: Monitoring and attack detection services, mitigation services that intercept attacks, and attack intelligence and post-attack intelligence services. In addition, Prolexic aggregates intelligence information and reports on active botnets and fraud-linked IP addresses. The company opened its first network traffic scrubbing center in North America in 2003, in Europe in 2005, and in Asia in 2007. In 2012, the company’s traffic scrubbing capability was in excess of 500 Gbit/s of bandwidth and comprised multiple carriers in a distributed global network. The firm was said to be investing in the infrastructure to cope with up to 1.2Tbit/s peak traffic loads by the end of 2013. Because many DDoS attacks are concerted efforts by sophisticated live attackers, Prolexic uses a combination of automated tools and human expertise as part of its services. In 2012, the company said it had successfully stopped all DDoS attacks affecting its clients to date, including attacks against
application servers An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a ...
, such as Layer 4 (
SYN flood A SYN flood is a form of denial-of-service attack in which an attacker rapidly initiates a connection to a server without finalizing the connection. The server has to spend resources waiting for half-opened connections, which can consume enough ...
s) and Layer 7 attacks, as well as HTTP GET flood attacks, zero-day attacks, UDP/ ICMP floods, TCP flag abuses, DNS reflection, and DNS attacks. Prolexic is said to have mitigated the largest DDoS attack of 2011, which involved 250,000 computers infected with
malware Malware (a portmanteau for ''malicious software'') is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, depri ...
. The company’s service typically mitigates attacks within 5 to 20 minutes after a client's network traffic starts flowing through a scrubbing center. Prolexic mitigated more than 30,000 DDoS attacks from 2003–2011. In 2011, Prolexic mitigated 10 to 80 attacks daily.


DDoS mitigation

In 2012, hacktivism and vandalism were cited as the main inspiration for DDoS attacks, rather than extortion as in the past. This type of motivation is said to make any company a victim, not just high-profile organizations. Organizations of all sizes are said to be at risk of DDoS attacks, because the newer application-level attacks are more targeted than classic DDoS botnet attacks and don’t need as many resources to deploy. The cloud-based
DDoS mitigation DDoS mitigation is a set of network management techniques and/or tools, for resisting or mitigating the impact of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on networks attached to the Internet, by protecting the target, and relay networks. DD ...
approach used by Prolexic employs technology to redirect traffic to the company’s DDoS mitigation service, scrub the traffic, and send only legitimate traffic to the client site. This attack mitigation approach is said to be lower-cost than the traditional approach of a company maintaining its own network firewall, making DDoS attack prevention an option for most firms doing business on the web.


See also

*
Denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...
*
Barrett Lyon Barrett Gibson Lyon (born March 18, 1978) is an American Internet entrepreneur. Early life and education The son of a lawyer, Lyon was raised in Auburn, California. Although he initially struggled in school due to dyslexia, in middle school he ...
* ''Fatal System Error''


References

{{Reflist


External links


Official Akamai Technologies website

Akamai Acquisition of Prolexic Announcement
Security companies of the United States Computer security companies Software companies based in Florida Companies based in Broward County, Florida Hollywood, Florida Computer companies established in 2003 2003 establishments in Florida DDoS mitigation companies 2014 mergers and acquisitions Defunct software companies of the United States