August 26, 2010

Meeting and greeting at HostingCon 2010

Filed under: Marketing — Tags: , — admin @ 5:35 am

Last month’s HostingCon 2010 in Austin, TX was an astounding success for us and a great opportunity for all involved. More than 1000 attendees visited the Black Lotus booth to discuss distributed denial of service solutions and to try to “Recover the Booty!” from our treasure chest. Some of the booty recovered included American Express gift cards, iPods, a Nintendo Wii, Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, and a Mac Mini.

HostingCon 2010 attendees speak with Black Lotus staff

HostingCon 2010 attendees speak with Black Lotus staff

We took this opportunity to discuss our upcoming public release of the Black Lotus MitigationPro by IntruGuard, a distributed denial of service and network behavior analysis appliance that will be publicly released in September. Last year attendees expressed interest in a Black Lotus branded appliance to enable them to take advantage of the Black Lotus protection on their own network. We listened! 3,000,000 packets per second and 1000 Mbps of DDoS protection is now available to the general public at a price point of less than $12,000 per appliance. Even better, our appliances are bundled with comprehensive service contracts managed by Black Lotus’ renowned CCNA/CCNP, JNCIS, and ICDME certified network engineers. Owning a MitigationPro is like having your own DDoS protection engineers on staff.

Ping! Zine interviews VP of Operations, Shawn Marck

Ping! Zine interviews VP of Operations, Shawn Marck

During the show we spoke with hundreds of attendees in depth about their DDoS protection needs and concerns and how Black Lotus solutions will increase their security and viability while helping manage the bottom line. We were interviewed by Ping! Zine and The WHIR, two of the most prominent media outlets in the web hosting industry.

If you missed us this time you can also find us at the following venues:

  • The WHIR Networking Event at Denver, CO on August 26th, 2010.
  • The WHIR Networking Event at Phoenix, AZ on September 23rd, 2010.
  • HostingCon 2011 in San Diego, CA on August 8th through 10th, 2011.

July 19, 2010

Black Lotus Selects Afilias to Improve DNS Reliability

Filed under: Marketing — Tags: — admin @ 8:26 am

DDoS protection vendor gets better value with Afilias as its new managed DNS provider


AUSTIN, Texas (HOSTINGCON) – 19 July 2010 – Afilias, a leading provider of Internet infrastructure services, announced that Black Lotus Communications has selected Afilias’ FlexDNSSM Platform to provide DNS infrastructure in support of its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection solutions. Black Lotus needed to replace its previous DNS provider in order to improve its resiliency to DDoS attacks and achieve better economy in its DNS management.

“Outsourcing our DNS allows us to focus on our core competencies and leverage numerous off-site nodes to discourage DDoS attacks against our name resolution infrastructure,” said Jeffrey Lyon, President of Black Lotus. “Since switching to Afilias, we were able to cut our costs by more than 50 percent and receive more value for about the same cost of running our own off-site nodes.”

Afilias’ FlexDNS Platform provides three different ways to utilize Afilias’ DNS network: A Web-based portal, AXFR (DNS zone transfer), or an Application Programming Interface (API). Black Lotus selected Afilias’ Web-based portal, which provides a simple, easy-to-use online interface to manage DNS settings for small or large portfolios of domains. The Web-portal also provides bulk import functionality, an advanced reporting suite, and enhanced security alerts and notifications.

Black Lotus also selected Afilias’ SiteCertainTM IP monitoring and failover service to ensure that their customers will always have a working IP address to failover to incase of emergency or compromise.

“Any organization that is providing critical services across the Internet needs to take their DNS seriously and ensure that they avoid single points of failure,” said John Kane, Vice President of Corporate Services for Afilias. “We are pleased to provide Black Lotus with both a valuable and cost-effective DNS solution to enhance the resiliency and reliability of their important DDoS protection services.”

About Afilias Managed DNS Services

Afilias’ state of the art DNS network ensures security and resiliency through a diverse any-cast architecture. Its multi-layered, tiered design uses multiple hardware and software solutions, multiple bandwidth providers, and is dispersed across numerous geographic locations, ensuring no single points of failure and 100 percent up-time, guaranteed. Afilias’ system also supports DNSSEC. To learn more about Afilias’ FlexDNS platform visitwww.flexDNS.info

About Black Lotus (HOSTINGCON Booth #101)

Black Lotus Communications is first and leading in distributed denial-of-service protection solutions. The company was the first to market a commercially viable DDoS protection solution and provides protected hosting services, web proxies, IP tunnels, and the ecologically friendly LotusCloud VM, a dedicated server environment that is 16 times more efficient than its bare metal counterpart. For more information visit www.blacklotus.net

About Afilias (HOSTINGCON Booth #535)

Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias’ reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications including Internet domain registry services, Managed DNS, and services in the RFID and supply chain market with its Afilias Discovery Services. For more information on Afilias please visit http://www.afilias.info.

July 15, 2010

Black Lotus Announces Platinum Sponsorship at HostingCon 2010

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: — admin @ 6:18 am

Virginia Beach, VA (Vocus) July 15, 2010 – Black Lotus, a leading distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection services company, announced today its platinum level sponsorship at HostingCon 2010, the hosting industry’s sixth annual convention. HostingCon 2010 will take place July 19-21 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX. Black Lotus offers specialized website hosting with DDoS services, including DDos protected hosting and DDoS protected dedicated servers (http://www.blacklotus.net/).

“We are excited to sponsor HostingCon as it provides the hosting industry a means of sharing ideas, learning about new technology and networking,” says Jeffrey Lyon, Director at Black Lotus. “This year’s theme of cloud hosting is especially relevant as Black Lotus now offers LotusCloud VM, a DDoS protected virtual solution that defeats attacks which take advantage of cloud hosting’s vulnerabilities.”

The many educational sessions offered at HostingCon 2010 include a track devoted to cloud hosting and cloud computing. Businesses interested in a DDoS protection host (http://www.blacklotus.net/hosting/) in addition to the scalability and flexibility of cloud hosting look to LotusCloud VM to receive embedded DDoS mitigation without purchasing separate services for their hosting and protection needs.

“LotusCloud VM is fully scalable, environmentally friendly and cost-effective, and is designed to drive clean traffic to your site” says Lyon. “Black Lotus has the specialized skills, technologies and bandwidth to offer an advanced DDoS protection service (http://www.blacklotus.net/) that conquers specialized DDoS attacks allowing every type of business to enjoy the 100% uptime that is critical for its success.”

Black Lotus’ DDoS protection solutions include DDoS protected servers and web hosting, colocation and remote protection. HostingCon attendees are encouraged to visit the Black Lotus booth to take part in the “Recover the Booty!” contest. Grab a key and see if your key opens the Black Lotus treasure box. While at HostingCon 2010, attendees can pick up a product sheet to learn more about effective website protection from Black Lotus, the first and leading DDoS protection services (http://www.blacklotus.net/) company.

“When businesses need 100% uptime, DDoS attacks can cost millions of dollars and in some cases, destroy a company’s reputation,” says Lyon. “Small and medium-sized businesses, ecommerce sites, companies offering hosting services, enterprise companies, or sites with highly confidential databases would benefit from our years of knowledge and expertise in DDoS protection and repelling thousands of malicious attacks every year.”

Black Lotus is a proud Platinum Sponsor of HostingCon 2010 in Austin, TX this July 19-21. Businesses with high traffic websites interested in DDoS protection services are encouraged to visit the Black Lotus booth at HostingCon 2010 to learn more about hosting with DDoS protection (http://www.blacklotus.net/).

About Black Lotus

Black Lotus has been providing robust and cost effective DDoS protection solutions since 1999. As the first and leading DDoS protection services company, Black Lotus stops robots in their tracks with advanced distributed denial of service protection delivering enterprise grade solutions at a fraction of the cost. The Black Lotus Enterprise network is the only purpose-built DDoS protected hosting (http://www.blacklotus.net/hosting/) network designed to combat distributed denial of service attacks from the ground up utilizing 100% premium name brand bandwidth. Black Lotus delivers hundreds of billions packets safely to their destination each month.

June 24, 2010

Black Lotus Announces DDoS Protection Cost Management White Paper

Filed under: Announcements — admin @ 7:50 am

Leading DDoS protection services provider analyzes the true cost of DDoS attacks.

Virginia Beach, VA (Vocus) June 24, 2010 — Black Lotus, a leading distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection services (http://www.blacklotus.net/) company, announced today its new Stopping DDoS Attacks: Cost Management Analysis white paper. The white paper describes the extent of potential DDoS devastation and the most important considerations for preventing DDoS attacks. Additionally, the white paper provides a cost management analysis on preventing DDoS attacks versus stopping DDoS attacks after they are already in progress.

“A DDoS attack and website unavailability can cost a company significant damage in expenses, reputation, and revenue,” says Jeffrey Lyon, President and CEO at Black Lotus. “Our new cost analysis white paper will help customers understand what a DDoS attack is and the types of DDoS protection services they can utilize to protect their business investment. By using our DDoS protection services (http://www.blacklotus.net/), our customers can stop and prevent attacks before it is too late.”

In a DDoS attack, an attacker simultaneously uses multiple computers to bring down a server, completely stopping a website from being available to its visitors and users. A successful DDoS attack dramatically increases traffic to the site resulting in slowed network response and servers refusing new connections. Eventually the server crashes and services stop completely, causing the website to lose visitors, traffic, revenue and even reputation. Black Lotus provides DDoS protection services at every level, from DDoS protected dedicated servers to colocation and web hosting with DDoS protection (http://www.blacklotus.net/), to prevent DDoS attacks.

“A company’s reputation is priceless and customer care is a major factor in building and maintaining a reputation, especially among enterprise businesses,” says Lyon. “The Black Lotus mission is to give you customized protection to secure your business from all attacks so you can remain available at maximum capacity to serve your customers and maintain your position as an industry leader.”

Monetary loss as a result of DDoS attack can vary per hour when services are down depending on the purpose of the website. Losses can include advertisement costs, investing in network infrastructure or web hosting, website development and promotion, loss of revenue from existing customers and loss of potential customers. These losses do not include the costs for service repair and incident response. Black Lotus DDoS protection hosting (http://www.blacklotus.net/hosting/) provides robust and cost-effective DDoS protection solutions to prevent monetary loss.

“Businesses whose online presence is critical, such as online stores, forums, game servers, social networks, and ecommerce companies should act before an attack causes a website to slow down or stop completely,” says Lyon. “Black Lotus DDoS protection solutions are customizable for the scale of your business and the type of IT infrastructure you have giving your business a future free of malicious DDoS threats and attacks.”

Businesses with high traffic websites interested in DDoS protection services are encouraged to download the Black Lotus white paper Stopping DDoS Attacks: Cost Management Analysis at http://www.blacklotus.net/protection/. Learn how to secure your business with DDoS protection from the DDoS prevention experts at Black Lotus.

About Black Lotus

Black Lotus has been providing robust and cost effective DDoS protection (http://www.blacklotus.net/) solutions since 1999. As the first and leading DDoS protection services company, Black Lotus stops robots in their tracks with advanced distributed denial of service protection delivering enterprise grade solutions at a fraction of the cost. The Black Lotus Enterprise network is the only purpose-built DDoS protected hosting network designed to combat distributed denial of service attacks from the ground up utilizing 100% premium name brand bandwidth. Black Lotus delivers hundreds of billions packets safely to their destination each month.

For more information about Black Lotus, visit http://www.blacklotus.net.

December 7, 2009

Black Lotus Launches Green Cloud Hosting With Built-In DDoS Protection Services

Filed under: Announcements, Marketing — Tags: , — admin @ 3:36 pm

Website owners can now get environmentally-friendly cloud hosting with built-in DDoS protection services.

Virginia Beach, VA (PRWEB) Dec. 7, 2009 – Black Lotus, a leading DDoS protection services company, announced today its new LotusCloud VM service, the first environmentally-friendly virtual server hosted in the cloud with high-end DDoS protection built-in. Website owners get the added security of DDoS protection without having to purchase DDoS protection services separately.

“Customers needing to rapidly deploy DDoS protected servers can use LotusCloud VM to do so on their own terms, with the exact configuration they need, all at an affordable price while helping the environment,” said Jeffrey Lyons, Director of Black Lotus. “Bare metal dedicated servers utilize an average of 40 to 460 watts of power, whereas LotusCloud VM only uses 7 watts per server, drastically reducing energy cost and carbon footprint.”

LotusCloud VM is a cloud protected by a cloud. Each LotusCloud VM instance is hosted on the Black Lotus Enterprise Network with pre-configured DDoS protection services. LotusCloud VM customers can include the hardware, OS, and software without checking or waiting for server availability for the ultimate in on-demand cloud hosting with DDoS protection services already added.

“LotusCloud VM is a low cost ‘in the cloud’ virtual DDoS protected dedicated server allowing customers to enjoy the same performance at a better price. In fact, a highly available, multi-core RAID environment is extremely affordable starting at $99.00 per month,” said Lyon. “With DDoS protection services already added to each LotusCloud VM, customers are ready to host their websites without having to worry about robots attacking and destroying their data.”

What used to take days to configure, is now automatically built-in to the existing cloud infrastructure using LAMP. Traditionally, the installation of LAMP management and custom configuration could have taken days, now it is all automated with the click of a mouse. Black Lotus customers wanting the built-in DDoS protection service can purchase LotusCloud VM pre-configured with cPanel/WHM, Litespeed web servers, and other security and performance tuning that comes standard with the LAMP product.

“Unlike any other cloud service in the market today, Black Lotus provides automatic native DDoS protection for the entire environment at 1000 Mbps without the need to purchase add-ons or an upgraded service level,” said Lyon. “Leveraging experienced network engineers and security technology from RioRey, IntruGuard, Juniper and Cisco, the network is protected by an in-depth defensive strategy capable of isolating malicious traffic and processing bad packets on multiple layers through both packet inspection and trend analysis.”

LotusCloud VM is a unique DDoS protected cloud hosting solution. For the first time in the history of managed DDoS protection, LotusCloud VM breaks the 1 Gbps threshold for less than $100.00 a month. Black Lotus is the first DDoS protection services network to establish a cloud and offer an affordable virtualized product.

About Black Lotus

Black Lotus has been providing robust and cost effective DDoS protection solutions since 1999. As the first and leading DDoS protection services company, Black Lotus stops robots in their tracks with advanced distributed denial of service protection delivering enterprise grade solutions at a fraction of the cost. The Black Lotus Enterprise network is the only purpose-built DDoS protected hosting network designed to combat distributed denial of service attacks from the ground up utilizing 100% premium name brand bandwidth. With a rated capacity of up to 8 Gbps and 2,000,000 packets per second, Black Lotus delivers over 22 billion packets safely to their destination each month.

November 26, 2009

The undetectable DDoS

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , — admin @ 2:41 pm

For several years HTTP GET attacks have plagued web hosts with an extremely frustrating problem. These attacks are “low and slow” in the sense that only a few connections can slip through a network firewall or DDoS filter, cause a web server to respond to the seemingly valid request, and then generate hundreds of megabits or even gigabits of egress bandwidth utilization.

Traditionally the common response to this was to either null route the IP and hope the problem goes away, try to filter each IP by hand which requires many hours or even days plus a functional understanding of iptables, or perhaps as a last ditch effort the services of a DDoS mitigation provider like Black Lotus. The latter has been extremely popular in recent days as a new variant of this attack has been detected in the wild.

The problem now is that an infected host will connect to a web server, make a seemingly legitimate HTTP request, and then fall off the radar. This is real user behavior and does not constitute a DDoS or even a DoS, therefore no network filters or even local filters will detect or mitigate this attack. Real user behavior, however, does not translate into a real user as these connections are still infected hosts. When you add them by the tens of thousands you have a nearly undetectable DDoS attack. The release of this intelligence has been delayed to allow us proper time to lab the problem and determine a solution.

On Tuesday evening system engineers at Black Lotus released an update to the Application Firewall and DDoS protection proxy products that has proven successful in defeating these attacks. The solution is to capture the HTTP request and log it for future analysis. A cron job runs on a regular interval and examines the logs. If a certain resource, for instance a large file or image, has an abnormal number of requests it is assigned a score. The request is then dropped from the destination or the entire network depending on the score.

For sake of example let’s say http://www.foobar.com is receiving 100 requests per day while http://www.foobar.com/images/background.jpg is receiving 6000 requests per hour each from a separate IP address. Those IP addresses are then scored  considered for either immediate or future exclusion depending on the severity. After several cron runs the attackers are effectively isolated and blocked with a success rate of more than 75%. Over a period of several hours the botnet is fully identified and blocked from the destination or from the network.

This new technology is available standard with DDoS protection proxies and with the Application Firewall product that can be added to any Elite level service such as DDoS protected dedicated servers or the new environmentally friendly LotusCloud VM.

October 1, 2009

Expansion efforts underway at Los Angeles facility.

Filed under: Announcements, Network Engineering — Tags: , , , — admin @ 9:07 am

Engineer and Leadership Team member Shawn Marck speaks briefly about the network expansion efforts currently under way at the Los Angeles facility (video muted due to sound quality in the datacenter). An infrastructure cabinet in the background of yesterday’s video contains newly installed RioRey and Juniper security equipment designed to improve quality of service for Black Lotus customers and better assist us in handling the latest in capacity upgrades. With this upgrade TeliaSonera, a prominent European transit provider, is being added to our BGP blend.

Installation of the RioRey in particular marks the beginning of a new partnership between Black Lotus and RioRey in providing advanced DDoS protection security solutions. The RioRey product adds a number of new features and benefits to the Black Lotus arsenal. This installation augments gear already in place from other security vendors designed at detecting and shaping DDoS attack traffic.

While Black Lotus has always been a Juniper shop on the security side of the house the new Netscreen installation replaces security functions traditionally outsourced to our upstream networks and enhances overall performance by transitioning from CPU to ASIC based filtering thus substantially increasing the amount of packets per second that can be handled.

Today marks the Phase II commencement of these efforts.

August 27, 2009

Black Lotus is featured in Ping! Zine

Filed under: Marketing — Tags: — admin @ 7:41 pm

pingzinecover1 If you were fortunate enough to find yourself at HostingCon 2009 you may have seen this issue of Ping! Zine floating around as it was left for distribution at numerous booths to include the Ping! Zine booth and our own Black Lotus booth. In the article captioned “Prevent DDoS Attacks,” PR specialist and technical writer Dave Young presents a 3rd party review of our services and the impact they have to companies in need of advanced DDoS protection services or who feel they may become the target of an attack.

The article provides a brief overview of our company history and the philosophy behind the services that we offer. Dave discusses our business strategies, product offerings, and how Black Lotus offers the leading edge in modern DDoS mitigation strategies.

The article can be downloaded here (approximately 9MB)

August 25, 2009

Celebrating a successful HostingCon 2009

Filed under: Announcements, Marketing — Tags: , — admin @ 2:48 pm
hostingcon2009dc-004

We’re proud to announce that on August 11th we made our first public convention appearance and met with hundreds of customers, future customers, friends, and vendors. The atmosphere was simply amazing and it did not take long to realize that our marketing budget was well spent. The event was so successful that we decided to come back in 2010 as Platinum sponsors where we’ll be unveiling a new and exciting hardware platform currently in development!

Ping! Zine put out a great review of our company in their HostingCon issue which was distributed from our booth along with various schwag from our friends and vendors.

Perhaps the most exciting part for some was the video game offering. Rather than hand out some pens, paper, or stress balls we went totally unique and setup a four station Xbox 360 lab with Call of Duty 4!

Our exhibit wasn’t just fun and games. Our company President and VP of Operations were on hand to answer questions about the company vision and products we offer.  We were commonly asked to explain the threats and challenges behind offering DDoS protection. Many visitors wanted to know how they could protect themselves and their customers. They learned about how Black Lotus has been in the business of stopping attacks for nearly 10 years and the evolution of the Black Lotus product as the world’s first commercialized DDoS protection solution.

Don’t worry if you missed this event, we’ll be back next year in full force!

Visitors playing Call of Duty 4 at the Black Lotus exhibit, HostingCon 2009

July 2, 2009

We’ve got HostingCon 2009 fever..

Filed under: Announcements, Marketing — Tags: — admin @ 2:29 pm
hostingcon_skids

Two skids wait at the dock for a July 2nd pickup with an ultimate destination in Landover, MD where they’ll be held until the show.

.. and the only cure is a prime location in the exhibit hall at the Gaylord National and more Call of Duty 4 than you can shake a stick at! August 10th through the 12th Black Lotus will be at the convention in full force rubbing elbows with customers, potential customers, vendors, industry gurus, and mostly just wasting a lot of time playing video games.

Don’t worry, we’re not the only ones who get to have fun! We’re setting up an additional four COD4 stations right in the middle of our exhibit directly at the main entrance so you don’t even have to walk far to get your game on. It’s not all fun and games though, HostingCon 2009 marks our first scheduled public appearance and a landmark opportunity to meet company executives and learn about the future of DDoS protection services. If you’ve been thinking of moving to Black Lotus the show is also a great time to learn about special offers and discounts available only to attendees!

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