Webscreen Systems has been selected to provide the Albanian low cost airline, Albatros Airways, with a brick wall solution to end attacks that have been crashing its online systems and costing the business €20,000 per day in lost ticket sales.

The Airline had been the victim of an extortion attempt and had seen their on-line reservation systems targeted by a sustained Botnet attack over a period of months. It was stopping its Travel Agency partners and legitimate customers from accessing the company’s online reservation service. Not content with trying to damage the company’s business the hacker (via emails to Albatros) blatantly demanded payment in return for switching off the attacks.

Rather than roll over and pay up the airline decided to look for a permanent solution that would prevent other hackers from trying their luck in the future. The company tasked the specialist secure hosting company VistaLogic to host their reservation servers and ensure the future integrity of their office networks. VistaLogic’s high security hosting platform, Vista, uses the Vista Mitigation farm (powered by Webscreen WS100 and WS1000 appliances) to stop DDoS attacks, which proved to be an immediate success stopping the zombie army in its tracks.

Robin Hill, VP of Sales at Webscreen said “Our technology has been designed to intelligently filter out bad internet traffic from legitimate users which means that if a Web site comes under attack anything malicious or of low priority will be blocked at the network gateway. In this case the hacker was using a network of hijacked computers to flood the Airline’s booking system with spurious but apparently legitimate requests. The Webscreen technology was able to distinguish the good from the bad and ensure that normal service was unaffected.”