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Public health institutions, authorities, and educational institutions can continue to use the service free of charge.
Update 01/07/2021: At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Link11, a specialized European cybersecurity provider, began allowing public health, government, and educational organizations to use its DDoS protection solutions free of charge until December 31, 2020. Link11 wanted to help these organizations deal with the pandemic while maintaining their online defenses. Today, Link11 extends its offer of free basic protection until March 31, 2021.
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 and mapping business processes via digital interfaces and collaboration tools. Schools and universities also remain closed and switch to online learning platforms. Public websites providing information on the rate of infections and existing measures are also suffering DDoS attacks, as shown by attacks on U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the websites of the Robert Koch Institute in Germany.
The rising number of digital working environments and their intense use offer cyber criminals new attack surfaces. Today, when data volumes are so large, even the smallest attacks can shut down organisations with home-office plans as well as schools via their digital platforms. As a result, reports of DDoS attacks have been growing in many countries since December 2020. In Germany, for example, several learning platforms have already been affected. Governmental websites with information on national infections and social measures are also in the crosshairs of hackers.
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 offer is free of charge and can be used until 31 March 2021.”
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.
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.
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