How DDoS Scrubbing Centers Work

One of the most important components in a quality distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation service is its scrubbing centers. Scrubbing centers allow DDoS protection companies to take traffic flooding client sites and separate bogus traffic from legitimate traffic and return the legitimate traffic to the site. This helps keep the client site up and running and prevents inconvenience to its visitors.

DDoS attacks are used by hackers to shut down target websites by flooding them with malicious traffic. These attacks are increasing in volume, complexity, size and duration, making a comprehensive strategy to counter them important for businesses and organizations that rely upon their websites for sales, interaction with visitors and more. Website outages can result in lost revenues, and they can also shake customer confidence in a business and result in customer defections to rival businesses.  When websites go down, they drag businesses down with them.

Some anti-DDoS mitigation services deal with bogus traffic by blackholing the traffic – that is, dumping the excess traffic to keep it from overwhelming the site. The problem with this tactic is that it also loses a lot of legitimate traffic, inconveniencing visitors to the site and potentially costing site owners customers and users.

When traffic is sent to a DDoS protection scrubbing center, it is processed using anti-DDoS software and good traffic is separated from bad. The good traffic is routed back to the site. This allows the client website to stay operational and process legitimate requests from real visitors to its site.

In a typical response to a DDoS attack, the traffic is routed first to the scrubbing center. The traffic is then categorized as infrastructure attack traffic or application layer attack traffic. Infrastructure attack traffic is usually more common than application layer attack. The attack traffic is then further differentiated by vector and other characteristics and dealt with by using the DDoS center’s proprietary technology.

When hiring a DDoS mitigation service provider, scrubbing centers should be something you ask potential providers about. Be sure that the service provider you choose has a high-capacity scrubbing center as part of its anti-ddos network  and is capable of handling the enormous volumes of traffic that come from a DDoS attack, because DDoS attacks are getting larger and larger each year.

A bandwidth capacity of 800 Gbps or more is a good yardstick to use in evaluating the capacity of a scrubbing center. You should also ensure that your DDoS mitigation service does not piggyback other services on its mitigation network, as this can result in a degradation of its ability to help stop distributed denial of service scrubbing attacks. It’s also typically a good idea to have a scrubbing center located on the same continent as the source of DDoS traffic, as geographic proximity can help facilitate faster, more effective DDoS mitigation service.

By shopping around and finding the right DDoS mitigation service provider with excellent scrubbing center capability, you can stop DDoS attacks from knocking out your website or network while preventing the loss of legitimate traffic.