News

Violence that engulfed Israel and Gaza in recent weeks has permeated the digital commons as well. Since Oct 7, 2023, Deflect recorded six significant DoS/DDoS attacks against Israeli human rights organizations (btselem.org) that culminated with 54 million attack events hitting our edge servers. We also recorded 11 significant DoS/DDoS attacks against the Palestinian news website (palestinechronicle.com), with a total of 7 million malicious hits in various attack formation.

After several years of laborious effort, we are proud to announce the public release of the new Deflect software ecosystem. In our Github organization https://github.com/deflect-ca you will find all official Deflect related open source repositories that allow you to stand up an entire website protection infrastructure or its individual components. Deflect offers a high-performance content… Read more: Introducing Deflect-next

This was a busy month for Deflect’s mitigation tooling, with Banjax blocking almost 12 million malicious requests launched by 108,294 different bots. Due to the war in Ukraine, many people turned to Deflect protected Ukrainian media sites for information. Throughout the month Deflect served 1,128,751,920 requests (almost double than the previous month) of which 283,570,50… Read more: Updates from Deflect – 3 – 2022

Since the beginning of this year, we have served over 1.5 billion website requests to approximately 13.5 million unique readers the world over! We mitigated over 17 distinct and significant attacks and kept our clients online 100% of the time! Our combined bot banning technology (machine lead predictions from Baskerville and confirmed anomalies by Banjax)… Read more: Updates from Deflect – 2 – 2022

Once again, the Deflect network grew in size and audience in 2021. Apart from the continuously stellar work of our clients, what stood out the most for the Deflect team tasked with network monitoring and adversary mitigation – was the increasing sophistication and ‘precision’ of Baskerville, outperforming human rule sets written for the Banjax mitigation… Read more: Deflect – a year in summary

We extend our machine learning capability to accept feedback from clients on prediction accuracy and to be able to modify the model without any interruption of service.

Deflect partners with technology and media groups around the world

The Deflect service is built around defense-in-depth principles to keep your website online, no matter the traffic coming in. Our network edges are located with multiple providers in data centers around the globe. Every edge on the Deflect network caches static webpage resources and can reply very quickly to a multitude of simultaneous requests. As… Read more: Go Banjax-Go!

Whether you are the owner of an independent media site telling the stories no one else will, a non-profit or community organization informing its members of available resources and events, or a company of any size, ensuring that your website stays protected and online is of the utmost importance.  Understanding the difference between indirect and… Read more: Everything you always wanted to know about protecting your website with Deflect* (*But were afraid to ask)

Since the beginning of this year, we have served over 2 billion website hits to approximately 18 million unique readers the world over! Deflect referrer program; The Deflect referrer program creates a mutually beneficial commercial opportunity for our clients. You will receive 50% of the first full month’s fees charged to every new client that subscribed from the link on your website….

– Non-DDOS attacks Any vector that does not require a large flood of traffic could be effectively routed through Tor.  This covers most attacks with the notable exception of DDoS. If I were trying to properly hack, not just DoS, Deflect – I would use Tor. – C&C functions Probably we wouldn’t observe this, but… Read more: Tor and DDoS attacks: myths and reality

A new website creation framework ‘Kandinsky‘ has just been released as a WordPress theme by our friends from «Теплица социальных технологий» (Greenhouse for Social Technologies) in response to needs expressed by civil society groups. The free and open source release on Github offers three templates for installation and guides website creators with helpful tips and… Read more: Kandinsky WordPress theme

Giant leaps in our machine-lead mitigation tooling have removed some of the heavy load in mitigating attacks from our support team this month. We’re very pleased with the machine’s performance but it won’t replace the humans! Below, we share some traffic highlights, Deflect relevant events and stories from our clients. January Traffic Throughout the month… Read more: Updates from Deflect – January 2021

The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined. ― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles Chapter 1 – Baskerville Baskerville is a machine operating on the Deflect network that protects  sites from hounding, malicious bots. It’s also an open source project that, in time, will… Read more: Introducing Baskerville (waf!)

In response and solidarity with numerous efforts that have sprung up to help with communications, coordination and outreach during the COVID-19 epidemic, eQualitie is offering Deflect website security and content delivery services for free until the end of 2020 to organizations and individuals working to help others during this difficult time. This includes: Availability: as… Read more: Deflect website security services for free in response to COVID-19

The attacks leading to the publication of this report quickly stood out from the daily onslaught of malicious traffic on Deflect, at first because they were using professional vulnerability scanning tools like Acunetix. The moment we discovered that the origin server of these scans was also hosting fake gmail domains[…]

In this report, we look at the performance of the Deflect Labs’ new anomaly detection tool, Baskerville, in identifying a selection of the attacks seen on the Deflect platform during the last year. Baskerville is designed to consume incoming batches of web logs[…]

Key Findings In November and December 2018, we identified 3 DDoS attacks against independent media website Кавказский Узел (Caucasian Knot) The first attack was by far the largest DDoS attack seen by the Deflect project in 2018, clocking over 7.7 million queries in 4 hours The three attacks used different types of relays, including open… Read more: News from Deflect Labs: DDoS attacks against Caucasian Knot

Key Findings We identified a DDoS attack against the Israeli human rights website www.btselem.org on the 2nd of November Attackers used three different type of relays to overload the website and were automatically mitigated by Deflect We identified the booter infrastructure (professional DDoS service) and accessed and analyzed its tools, which we describe in this article In… Read more: Deflect Labs Report #4 – Anatomy of a booter

Key Findings We identified traffic from thousands of IPs trying to brute-force WordPress websites protected by Deflect using the same user-agent (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0) since September 2017 We confirmed that it was not only targeting Deflect protected websites, but targeting also a large number of websites over Internet We analyze in… Read more: News From Deflect Labs: Botnet Targeting WordPress Websites