Neustar, Inc., real-time content neutral provider of information analysis services, and Limelight Networks Inc., global leader in digital content delivery, have joined forces to enable business customers to weather Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The partnership combines Neustar’s DDoS mitigation solution SiteProtect with Limelight’s content delivery network (CDN) to provide what the companies are calling the world’s largest, most distributed DDoS mitigation network.

The Neustar-Limelight relationship will allow SiteProtect to operate as an entirely unique, integrated and distributed DDoS mitigation network with 27 in-region DDoS migitation centers across the globe. With these mitigation centers placed strategically between content providers and their customers, it means that Neustar can better absorb DDoS attacks as close as possible to the attack source.

In the case of DDoS the first “D” for “distributed” creates the biggest problem: attacks come from diffuse, spread out networks and focus down on a single target.

Oftentimes mitigating attacks requires upstream providers (further away from the target) to redirect or black-hole incoming bad traffic to allow more good traffic to come through. With multiple globally-positioned centers processing traffic, absorbing distributed attacks becomes more effective because portions of the distributed attack will pass through different centers, each of which can filter out those portions before they can concentrate and do damage.

Neustar points to its UltraDNS service as the source of the its close-to-source distributed mitigation capacity.

With increased in-region presence, Neustar is now more capable of redirecting traffic as it comes from a particular region (before it is transported out region to the next hop) and “scrubbing” the bad traffic. This is in contrast to the past industry standard of concentrating traffic through a central datacenter or centers for filtering before sending it along to its destination.

The damage that DDoS can do means that the entire supply chain needs to be on board

“We understand how important it is for our customers to protect critical infrastructure and ensure systems and websites are up and running 24×7,” said Rodney Joffe, Neustar’s Senior Vice President, Distinguished Engineering Fellow, and Head of National Security. “The global scale and stability of the Limelight platform will enable Neustar to outpace attackers and mitigate the world’s largest DDoS attacks with unrivaled performance and minimal disruption.”

According to a study by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Development LP DDoS was a significant portion of the $15.4 million lost by American firms in 2015.

Since then, experts in the DDoS mitigation industry predicted that 2016 would become the year of shared defence—according to Bill Barry, executive vice president of Global Strategy at DDoS mitigation service Nexusguard Ltd. said in 2016 the industry would learn to communicate with itself and start doing the “D” in “distributed” and enable better “D” as in “defense.”

As the content delivery network (CDN) and Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry matures in the face of DDoS defense, this Neustar-Limelight deal is exactly in line with that prediction: a distributed mitigation service partnered with a global content delivery network.

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