Ukraine deploys a DDoS protection service to survive the cyberwar

Yesterday, cybersecurity provider Radware announced that Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (SSSCIP) is using Radware’s Cloud DDoS Protection and Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) service to protect itself amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. 

Ukraine’s SSSCIP is responsible for protecting Ukraine’s state information resources, and will use Radware’s services to protect the country against zero-day and known DDoS and application attacks. 

“It’s our top priority to protect the IT infrastructure in Ukraine,” said Victor Zhora, the deputy chief of Ukraine’s SSSCIP. “Radware has helped us shield our networks, protect our applications and bolster the resilience of our IT infrastructure.” 

This partnership highlights that DDoS and application-level attacks remain one of the most substantial threats facing modern organizations, not just in the context of the cyberwar between Russia and the Ukraine, but more broadly as part of the cybercriminal community. 

Protecting the cloud from cyberwar 

The announcement of the partnership comes as Ukraine has been targeted by a high volume of cyberattacks since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, which began with a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks attributed to Russian-state sponsored threat actors. 

The SSSCIP is using Radware’s services in an attempt to increase its resilience against these types of advanced attacks that target Ukraine’s cloud services. 

“By using the right level of protection, it is possible to defend against very advanced, high-volume attacks — whether they originate from hacker groups or nation-state actors,” said Radware’s chief business officer, Yoav Gazelle. 

When it comes to defending against advanced attacks, Gazelle highlights that protection solutions must go beyond traditional rate-limiting and negative-based security models, and instead use machine learning to automatically detect and mitigate complex attacks in real time. 

“This is especially important today with the talent shortage in cybersecurity that organizations worldwide are facing. Organizations cannot rely on solutions that require manual configuration and signature creation, and must deploy automated solutions,” Gazelle said.

When mitigating DDoS attacks, Gazelle recommends that enterprises deploying protection solutions look for providers that can mitigate volumetric attacks and low-volume micro floods, burst attacks and encrypted attacks, which are designed to bypass their defenses. 

The DDoS and application-protection market 

When considering that the average cost of a DDoS attack in the U.S. is $218,000, and 60% of organizations report they have no to moderate confidence in their ability to manage attack-surface risk, it’s unsurprising that more organizations are beginning to invest in DDoS and application-protection solutions. 

Today, both the DDoS protection and application security markets are in a state of growth, with the former expected to grow from $3.3 billion in 2021 to $6.7 billion by 2026, and the latter expected to increase from $6.2 billion in 2020 to $13.2 billion by 2025. 

Radware is one of the key providers benefitting from this growth, raising $286.5 million in revenue last year, but it isn’t the only one. It’s also competing against Cloudflare, which offers a DDoS protection service that secures websites and applications. 

Cloudflare has been recognized as a leader in the 2019 “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide DDoS Prevention Solutions” and 2017 “Forrester Wave: DDoS Mitigation Solutions.” It also recently reported raising $656.4 billion in total revenue in 2021. 

Likewise, Akamai is a key player in the space as well, offering DDoS protection as part of its security and edge computing solution, Akamai Edge Security, which offers 200+ Tbps of extra network capacity to help organizations increase their resilience against DDoS attacks.

At the start of this year, Akamai announced it had raised $3.5 billion in revenue during 2021. 

However, Gazelle says that Radware’s use of unique algorithms and machine learning techniques differentiate it from other providers in the market, by enabling users to continue to use normal application services without degradation, even during serious attacks.