This article by BetaNews covers a new trend of “Newsletter Bombs“, as a new form of DDoS. This time, instead of your Web Site being taken-down, your e-mail box is rendered useless.

From monitoring our logs and discussing with our clients, we have reasons to believe that our product HiveShield, available for deployment in AWS Cloud or on any CentOS/Linux thru our HiveShield Enterprise offering, will prevent those robots from automatically signing-up to newsletters available on web sites. As such we recommend that most sites at the very least consider trying-out our technology, such that they do not become part of an increasing problem.

Back when we first set out to design a best-of-breed solution for DDoS Attack Mitigation and Protection, we focused on these core aspects:

• Solve the Layer 7 Challenge: Accurately block HTTP attacks pretending to be legitimate users loading your pages.
• Stay away from aggregate and statistical heuristics prevalent in the DDoS Mitigation Industry: They result in far too many false negatives and false positives. In layman’s terms, it means that too many legitimate users get blocked, and too few harmful attack robots get blocked.
• Develop the Ultimate Real-Time Robot Detection Framework

After half a decade of research and development, we first launched HiveShield on AWS 2 years ago.

As we deployed HiveShield on our own WordPress installation, as well as a growing suite of clients, we right-away noticed one thing:

Comment Spam Stopped Coming-In.

We noticed it on our own site, and our clients reported this as well. Further, our clients started reporting that HiveShield would catch and block brute-force password login attempts.

We had built an advanced and incredibly effective real-time robot detection and blocking framework — And while it was certainly effective at blocking DDoS Attack Bots, it was also effective at blocking just about all sorts of robots.

HiveShield is like having CAPTCHA in front of your entire application.

Of course we took great care to look after legitimate search engine, social media, and health-checking crawlers. We eat our own dog food, and you’ll find hivewind.com does well on those fronts.

As always, if you’re interested in learning more about all this, please consider downloading our presentation on The DDoS Attacks Threat Landscape & Defensive Countermeasures.