Link11 Extends DDoS Protection Offer to Public Sector Organizations During the Covid-19 Pandemic

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Public health institutions, authorities, and educational institutions can continue to use the service free of charge until the end of the year.

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Link11, Europe’s leading cybersecurity provider, began allowing public health, government, and educational organizations to use its IT protection solutions free of charge until September 30. Link11 wanted to help these organizations deal with the pandemic while maintaining their online defenses. Today, Link11 extended its offer of free protection until the end of 2020.

Cybercriminals try to take advantage of the exceptional digital situation through Covid-19

Public infrastructure is more critical than ever during the pandemic. To provide ongoing services to citizens, governments, and organizations all over the world have taken necessary actions such as implementing remote-work policies. Such actions contributed to the 40% rise in global internet traffic recorded between the start of February and mid-April 2020. IT infrastructure operators such as DE-CIX and telecom providers such as Vodafone have also reported global increases in data traffic since March.
Today, when data volumes are so large, even the smallest attacks can shut down companies and their home-office plans. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are taking advantage of this situation. Between April and June, the number of DDoS attacks registered by the Link11 Security Operations Centre was 97% higher on average than in the same period in 2019. It reached a peak of 108% in May 2020.

Increased protection needed for the public sector

“It takes only a small effort these days to overload servers and online services and organizations need to protect their infrastructures,” says Link11’s COO, Marc Wilczek. “In light of the evolving threat landscape, Link11 is continuing to offer government, educational, and public health organizations a solution designed to proactively identify, block, and mitigate DDoS attacks within the Link11 Cloud Protection Platform.”

The root problem is that traditional on-premise DDoS defenses and load-balancing products cannot protect individual websites, APIs, or cloud applications against Layer-7 attacks. These malicious data tsunamis can cause widespread damage and instantly bring operations to a standstill.
For example, in March 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suffered a cyber-attack designed to impair the agency’s services and hamper the government’s pandemic response. In a matter of hours, the hackers – assumed to be hostile foreign actors – reportedly tried to overload HHS servers with millions of hits.

Such attacks are preventable. Cloud-based DDoS protection such as Link11’s integrated Cloud Security Platform leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning, strict automation, and real-time analytics to ensure cyber-resilience for the entire IT infrastructure and application landscape. It supports hybrid as well as cloud-native deployments.

For more information about Link11’s free DDoS protection get in contact with us.