200+ Tbps total filtering capacity
SLA 99.99%
Block DDoS attack from the first request by sessions, not IPs
Server protection
Protecting servers against DDoS attacks at the network (L3), transport (L4), and application (L7) layers in data centers around the world.
Network Protection
Protect your datacenter with Protected IP Transit service
How our filtering platform works
The Gcore security platform consists of our own scrubbing centers around the world.
The scrubbing centers are connected to several service providers and have backup copies of all systems, such as cleaning servers, managing servers, data storage systems, and network equipment.
The Gcore security platform guarantees no delays and no performance degradation for your digital business.
Your users and customers won’t even notice that your web resource has been attacked.
The types of DDoS attacks we protect against
Cyberattacks are becoming more complex and multi-vectored:
Network-layer DDoS attacks sap networks’ bandwidth and disrupt the target’s interactions with partners and clients.
Connection-layer DDoS attacks overload a server with a large number of TCP packets (typically with the SYN/RST/ACK/PSH messages) to consume all its available resources.
Application-layer DDoS attacks interfere with or even completely paralyze the operation of business applications, which causes huge material and reputational losses for the targets.
To learn more, please read our radar report "DDoS attack trends"
Advanced protection features
Proprietary DDoS protection solution
Low-frequency attacks detection from the first query
False positive rate is less than 0,01%
Real-time statistics in the control panel
Server protection in your data center through the GRE tunnel
24/7, high-qualified technical support
Use cases in demand
Recent case studiesMore case studies
Fawkes Games Thwarts DDoS Attacks for Seamless Gaming Experiences
Founded in 2022, Fawkes Games Ltd is a European indie gaming studio known for publishing popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as Shaiya and Last Chaos. The company’s mission is to breathe new life into forgotten games and reignite passion within their communities. When faced with significant cybersecurity challenges, Fawkes partnered with Gcore to implement a robust DDoS protection solution, ensuring exceptional gaming experiences for players worldwide. Rising Popularity Attracts Persistent Cyber Threats Fawkes offers end-to-end game operations services, including hosting, community building, user acquisition, retention, and streamlining user feedback. In 2023, the company faced a series of sophisticated DDoS attacks, resulting in service disruptions and a decline in player satisfaction. The attacks began as persistent short bursts and escalated into vast connection floods, peaking at 2 Tbps. The company’s existing security provider was unable to manage the scale and multi-vector nature of these attacks, which bypassed conventional security measures, causing significant disruption to the company’s operations. “From the moment we went live, our servers were under constant threat. We were bombarded with attacks that overwhelmed our infrastructure and affected gameplay. The attacks demanded a significant portion of our resources, with up to 30% of our engineering time dedicated to DDoS mitigation alone,” explains Nico, Operations Director at Fawkes. The attacks not only strained the company’s resources but also jeopardized its reputation for delivering stable and immersive gaming environments. Tailored Countermeasures to Combat Sophisticated DDoS Attacks Fawkes needed a robust security solution that could handle persistent and constantly evolving DDoS attacks. After evaluating various options, the company selected Gcore as the ideal partner to bolster its security posture. Gcore’s distributed network infrastructure and advanced technologies, including its user datagram protocol (UDP) challenge-response system, aligned perfectly with the team’s requirements for neutralizing large-scale DDoS attacks. “Gcore’s features enabling us to limit connections per IP and implement user challenge protections were exactly what we needed,” comments Ivan, Technical Director at Fawkes. Deploying Gcore DDoS Protection marked a turning point for Fawkes. Gcore developed a tailored defense strategy with protocol-specific countermeasures that were integrated into Fawkes’ infrastructure using a proxy server. The integration process was seamless and efficient, minimizing disruptions and quickly fortifying the company’s defenses. Mitigating DDoS Attacks with Ease and Increasing Operational Efficiency The results were immediate and impactful, both for the company and its global gaming community. With Gcore DDoS Protection in place, Fawkes successfully thwarted multiple botnet attacks. Gcore’s mitigation systems effectively neutralized these attacks before they ever reached Fawkes’ infrastructure, ensuring that services remained flawless and uninterrupted. “Since implementing Gcore, we’ve successfully mitigated massive DDoS attacks without our players experiencing any disruption, underscoring the exceptional performance and reliability of our services,” says Nico. The implementation of Gcore DDoS Protection not only ensured service stability but also marked a significant improvement in operational efficiency at Fawkes. The reduction in time spent on DDoS mitigation freed up valuable resources for game development and community engagement initiatives. “With Gcore, we’ve achieved a newfound stability in our operations, which has undoubtedly enhanced the gaming experience of our player community,” comments Ivan. A Strategic Partner to Stay Ahead of Security Threats The strategic collaboration between Fawkes and Gcore extends beyond immediate problem-solving. Through regular updates and strategic discussions, Gcore proactively assists Fawkes in staying ahead of potential cybersecurity threats. “Open communication with Gcore, including during attacks, provides us with peace of mind and confidence in our security measures,” concludes Nico. Gcore has enabled Fawkes to overcome complex cybersecurity challenges, secure game operations, and reinforce its commitment to providing an outstanding gaming experience to player communities worldwide. Looking ahead, this partnership underscores the critical role of advanced cybersecurity in the ever-evolving landscape of online gaming.
Infrastructure for billions of gamers around the world: The experience of Photon
Founded in 2004 for mobile, PC, Web, Console, VR/AR, developers use Photon to create games and applications that offer synchronous real-time multiplayer experiences that scale to millions of players. Photon powers thousands of games and applications which are enjoyed by over +1.2 billion users a month. Over 650,000 developers—including some of the world’s leading companies—trust Photon to fuel their real-time experiences, including EA, Disney, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Oculus, Voodoo, RecRoom, VRChat, BandaiNamco and Scopely.The goalEvery day, Photon powers game processes for all major game genres (from action, arcade, and hyper-casual to MMO) for billions of gamers around the world. A truly global infrastructure was required for players to have a positive experience.Publishers expect us to provide a fast, reliable and scalable platform for their multiplayer games, so that their player’s experience is top notch, regardless of country and device.Christof Wegmann CTO & Founder of PhotonThe project requires high CPU and network IO performance, so Photon needs the best available hosting power.They needed an infrastructure that is able to process a huge number of requests and also repel DDoS attacks to preserve the reputation of studios in the eyes of players.After analyzing the market options, the engineers at Photon selected Gcore as one of the main providers of server capacity and DDoS protection.Gcore has a tremendous experience of working with AAA game studios and publishers around the world — from Bandai Namco to Wargaming. We now have several years of positive experience in our cooperation and feel our infrastructure is in good hands with Gcore.Christof Wegmann CTO & Founder of PhotonThe resultsOne of the success reason of Photon as the #1 network engine in the world is the network of trusted partners to help them. The success of the live games depends not only on the gameplay, but also on the connection stability and performance. Gcore servers help Photon to guarantee the perfect connectivity and continuity of their product.With the help of Gcore services, Photon operations team do not need to worry about DDoS attacks, and they can scale the infrastructure fast. This reduces the time for launching new regions worldwide and significantly saves costs.Why Photon chose Gcore Hosting and ProtectionTier III and Tier IV certified data centers around the worldVariety of configurations and upgrade possibilitiesDDoS protection24/7 noc supportSelect a serverSign up for DDoS Protection
How we protect Wargaming against DDoS attacks
Wargaming is one of the world’s largest publishers and developers in the free-to-play MMO market.Wargaming games’ audience, including the flagship projects World of Tanks and World of Warships, consists of more than 200 million users on all major gaming platforms.The situationIn 2020, the structure of global traffic changed significantly. Our research has shown a dramatic increase in content consumption in the online gaming and entertainment industry. Along with the growing interest in these industries, the number of DDoS attacks targeting infrastructure and game servers has grown.One of the targets of the cybercriminals was our customer, Wargaming.How game development is DDoS’d in 2021In the recent years, attacks have become smarter and more sophisticated.Increasingly, they are directed at web applications themselves, rather than at specific servers (L7 of the OSI network model). At the same time, attackers very often try to imitate legitimate gaming traffic, which makes it difficult to detect and repel such attacks.To prevent an attack and separate legitimate and malicious traffic, the traffic must be received and processed. Therefore, high network capacity and a large number of high-speed channels are the main requirements in the fight against DDoS attacks. If the channels are overloaded, the traffic simply cannot get to the DDoS protection system for subsequent cleaning. In such a case, not only the protected customers suffer, but the entire location.What attack hit WargamingOn February 18, 2021, the Gcore defense systems detected an attack aimed at Wargaming servers.The total volume of the attack was 253 Gbps, and it lasted about 15 minutes. The attackers used the UDP Flood method.What is UDP FloodUDP Flood is distributed, artificially generated traffic. The attacker, as a rule, first studies all the subtleties of the gaming application and then generates UDP packets from fake IP addresses (on average, more than 100,000 unique IP addresses can be used in one attack).How we repelled this attackBy using filter rules to protect against well-known amplification attacks, we deflected some of the malicious traffic at our border routers. We redirected the other part to our cleaning system in order to analyze this traffic deeper and make a more informed decision about blocking.“Attacks with a capacity of 200–300 Gbps are no longer uncommon today. It’s important that the vendor’s cleanup center that ensures customer protection can handle large amounts of traffic with minimal latency. We at Gcore do this by using a distributed server system and balancing traffic between these systems.”Andrey Slastenov, Head of Web Security at GcoreOur method is based on the transfer of a secret key between the client application and the cleaning center, which is guaranteed to separate legitimate and malicious traffic. This way, we ensure the safety of the customer’s infrastructure and the high-quality cleaning of malicious traffic. If a powerful attack of several hundred gigabits per second is detected, traffic is distributed across several servers and several cleaning centers, thus avoiding overloading the server or even an entire server cluster.“As a result, the attack on Wargaming resources was successfully repelled, game server users continued to enjoy uninterrupted service, and the server was available to users all over the world for the whole time.”Andrey Slastenov, Head of Web Security at GcoreHow we keep game servers available during a DDoS attackAttacks are detected and traffic is cleaned automatically in traffic validation mode.The protection is enabled per request.The protection is configured for your infrastructure individually. For maximum efficiency, we analyze your traffic profile and come up with a set of effective measures.We immediately report any traffic anomalies to tech support. We usually detect attacks within 1 minute.If a cleanup decision is made, all inbound traffic is directed through the filtering platform. This results in only clean traffic arriving at your servers via a dedicated channel.How we successfully repel any DDoS attackHuge bandwidth of the Gcore network allows us to process tens of terabits of traffic.Our advanced cleaning system is capable of receiving, detecting, and neutralizing attacks of hundreds of gigabits per second.The comprehensive protection algorithms preclude the possibility of bypassing our cleaning system, even if the attackers use traffic similar to legitimate gaming traffic to attack.Enable infrastructure protection
How we protected Albion Online against complex and massive DDoS attacks
About Albion Online Albion Online is a sandbox MMORPG set in an open medieval-style world. The game allows players to combine armor and weapons for numerous different playstyles, explore the world, challenge other adventure-seekers in exciting battles, conquer territories, craft items, and build their own homes. The game’s official launch was in 2017, and in April 2019 it went free-to-play. Today, Albion Online is a true cross-platform MMO available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Why did Sandbox Interactive choose our hosting? The free-to-play launch brought huge amounts of players into the game from all over the world. Server stability, scalability and an effective DDoS protection are paramount for an online game of this scale. Thanks to our successful track record of designing and supporting infrastructure for large video game developers like Wargaming and RedFox Games, Albion Online’s developers entrusted hosting to Gcore. After all, we are the only hosting company with Guinness World Record-awarded infrastructure! DDoS attacks after free-to-play DDoS attacks are a common scourge in the games industry, particularly for successful publishers. Sandbox Interactive was no exception: immediately after the free-to-play release, the game was targeted in a series of coordinated attacks, more intense than usual. The solutions we used to reflect DDoS attacks on client servers previously did not fit the Sandbox Interactive case, as Albion Online was attacked via UDP Flood. What is Generated UDP Flood? Generated UDP Flood is a distributed, artificially generated traffic. An attacker usually preliminarily explores the intricacies of the game application and then generates UDP packets from spoofed IP addresses (on average, more than 100,000 unique IP addresses can be involved in a single attack). What makes protecting against such attacks difficult? The IP address and port of the server (in this case, the address of the game server and the application port) are targeted. In particularly difficult cases, an attacker can guess the size (window) of a legitimate packet and generate the necessary bitrate for the SRC_IP and DST_IP pair (one flow). This effectively obstructs filtering. For example, you cannot use countermeasures that are filtered on the basis of rate-limiting. If an attack is well-generated, it is almost impossible to distinguish legitimate (game) traffic from illegitimate traffic by means of analysis. In the real world, the game application can encrypt UDP payload (e.g. DTLS), which renders countermeasures such as regex_based_filtering useless. Finding a regexp close to the one used by the application is a difficult but possible task. It all depends on the attacker’s persistence. There are not that many countermeasures to filter such attacks. Which filtering methods were required? Effectively reflecting DDoS attacks on Sandbox Interactive/Albion Online required support for all existing filtering methods: Rate-limiting: This countermeasure uses various techniques for limiting traffic, for example via the SRC_IP and DST_IP pair. In this case, though, part of the traffic will still reach the server, and an attacker can guess an approximate bitrate of the legitimate application. For dynamic applications, this measure is not efficient. Regexp-filtering: You can either skip or discard packets that match regexp in payload. This is quite efficient, but for some types of applications it is not always possible to write a regexp for whitelisting, which means that we can only discard “bad” packets. In these cases, this method becomes extremely inefficient. Whitelisting: This implies a server login where the player is pre-authenticated, and his or her IP address is added to the whitelist (for example, via the API). Everything contained in the whitelist is allowed at the game port, the rest is discarded. The method has its drawbacks: it cannot always be architecturally appropriate, and it is difficult to maintain the current state of whitelisting (the user can close the browser while still being logged into the system), and the use of Idle Timeout may lead to the system blocking the player’s session after a certain period of time, forcing reauthentication. In addition, some operators can create NAT from a pool of addresses. Doing so may result in the user’s IP address being changed during the game. Blacklisting: This works the same way as whitelisting, but in reverse, i.e. “bad” addresses are added to the list. (In fact, there are not many cases where this countermeasure will be effective.) As a result, the main problem was that there were not many solutions on the market that supported all of the above filtering methods. Ours, however, does! IP geolocation filter: This involves blocking IP addresses based on geographical location, such as from high-risk countries. But this countermeasure is also quite easy to bypass. The solution we proposed To protect Albion Online against DDoS attacks, we suggested using the Gcore software suite. This is one of those solutions that not only support all of the above countermeasures, but is also brand-new and unparalleled in attack mitigation technology. Gcore’s Challenge Response (CR) is one such unique method. This is a stand-alone protocol; integrating it into the client allows passing the challenge for the application, thus validating the IP address of the client. This solution is well-suited when it is not possible to validate traffic. We recommend using it for all gaming applications. Oleg Yudin Head of Global Network and Security Department at Gcore The result: Albion Online is now securely protected Thanks to Gcore’s Challenge Response (CR), we have reliably protected Albion Online. The game remains accessible to users all around the world. Indeed, attacks on Albion Online are still ongoing. Moreover, there are now more complex attacks having a new vector. But thanks to our service, the actions of cybercriminals effect neither the client’s business nor their players. Oleg Yudin Head of Global Network and Security Department at Gcore Having a reliable and quick-to-respond hosting partner is crucial to the success of an MMO game like Albion Online. Gcore delivers just that. Whether it was the implementation of an advanced DDoS protection solution for our game, or resolving the connectivity issues of individual players, the Gcore technicians have been there for us 24/7. Always helpful, professional and dedicated. David Salz CTO at Sandbox Interactive As our customers’ experience shows, to attain and maintain success in the gaming industry, it is important not only to create exciting game worlds, but also to have a powerful and invulnerable infrastructure… …and that’s what we at Gcore can provide for you. Select a server and get protected against DDoS attacks
Plans
| PRO | CUSTOM | |
|---|---|---|
VALUES | €3.9/Mbps | Custom |
OSI Layers | Protection against DDoS attacks at the network (L3), transport (L4), and application (L7) layers. | Protection against DDoS attacks at the network (L3), transport (L4), and application (L7) layers. |
GRE Tunnel | 2 | 2 |
Secure Transit | ||
Additional Terms | *Price depends on location. **Minimum commitment rate 100Mbps. ***price for 1Mbps/Month. | Connection and configuration of additional equipment in your data center required. |
Technical Support | 24/7 Email, chat, phone | 24/7 Email, chat, phone |
PRO
€3.9/Mbps
OSI Layers | Protection against DDoS attacks at the network (L3), transport (L4), and application (L7) layers. |
GRE Tunnel | 2 |
Secure Transit | |
Additional Terms | *Price depends on location. **Minimum commitment rate 100Mbps. ***price for 1Mbps/Month. |
Technical Support | 24/7 Email, chat, phone |
CUSTOM
Custom
OSI Layers | Protection against DDoS attacks at the network (L3), transport (L4), and application (L7) layers. |
GRE Tunnel | 2 |
Secure Transit | |
Additional Terms | Connection and configuration of additional equipment in your data center required. |
Technical Support | 24/7 Email, chat, phone |
To estimate the cost of the project, tell us in detail about the infrastructure that needs protection.
Prices are shown minus VAT.
