ISP uses Border Gateway Protocol Firewall to improve DDoS protection

Who is Goldnet?

Goldnet is an Internet Service Provider operating since 1995 in the north east of Italy and hosts 100 Virtual Machines, over 2,000 domains and 5,000 mailboxes. It also offers connectivity, hosting, housing and web agency services.

The challenge

Goldnet had been heavily hit by a DDoS attack that knocked their infrastructure offline for several hours and was only resolved by de-localizing their DNS.

The organization realized that even small DDoS attacks progressively intensified, slowing down or temporarily blocking part of their infrastructure and the services to their customers.

Goldnet started looking for a solution that could mitigate or definitively eliminate this problem without investing in new resources or installing and maintaining additional equipment.

The solution

The security team identified the Spamhaus Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as the best solution for their problem and configured their edge router as outlined by Spamhaus.

BGP feeds provide an additional layer in network security defenses. Any routers within your network that are peered with the Spamhaus BGP router will not be able to communicate with botnet C&Cs, preventing data egress and spamming from infected nodes on the network.

The results

After a few hours of configuring the edge router, the team noticed an 80% decline in spam traffic from infected or malicious servers. All this led to a reduced workload for the company’s servers and increased performance.