The recent explosion of ICOs has been pretty magnificent to behold. In 2017 alone ICOs managed to raise over $1.3 billion in funds, significantly more than any previous year.
ICOs come in all shapes and sizes, and it can be tough to decide which ones are worthy of investment, and which are doomed to fail.
One promising ICO is Gladius, which aims to first change the way DDoS attacks are dealt with using blockchain technology and some ingenious ideas. And secondly, to improve the current content delivery industry (CDN) to make a more distributed, faster and cheaper alternative to modern CDNs.
To see why Gladius is so exciting, it’s important to take a quick look at just how damaging DDoS attacks are, and why it’s so vital to find new ways to challenge them.
The dangers of DDoS
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. It’s a type of cyber attack where hackers gain control of a number of devices with internet access, like Internet of Things gadgets. Once their network of ‘bots’ is large enough, it can be instructed to visit a certain website or server.
The massive influx of spam traffic often overwhelms the bandwidth of the victim server, causing the site to crash or experience service disruption.
The consequences of this can be devastating for businesses. The average cost of a DDoS attack was found to be $500,000, around $40,000 per hour. What’s more, these events can really damage customers’ trust in a website or company, as it makes them look unreliable and open to attack.
What’s more, DDoS attacks are on the rise, and in a big way. Q1 2017 saw a staggering 380% increase in these attacks from the same point in the previous year, suggesting that this risk will only become greater as time goes on.
It makes sense, then, that companies are spending a lot of time and money on preventing these attacks. According to some sources, companies need to be spending $2000-5000 at a minimum for effective prevention.
That’s a lot of money, considering that most current approaches to DDoS defense are far from perfect.
The current methods
What happens when the preventative measures fail, and companies fall victim to a flood of zombie traffic?
There are a few mainstream tactics for defeating DDoS attacks. One involves trying to separate the good traffic (customers and genuine site visitors) from the bad spam traffic under the hackers’ spell.
Unfortunately, this is rather flawed and often grants access to the bad traffic while blocking the good.
A more high-level approach is to decentralize the site’s delivery, so traffic is shared between a number of servers instead of overloading just one. The problem with this method is that it’s highly expensive, and more advanced attacks can get around it.
It all seems hopeless. Fortunately, Gladius believe they have the solution.
Gladius’ method
Gladius think the key to DDoS defense is in decentralization and collective protection. The plan is to build a system of connected users with the ability to share bandwidth and hard disk storage to protect and accelerate websites all over the world.
This way, when one member of the network is faced with a DDoS attack, their peers can ‘rent’ some of their spare bandwidth. This extra data can help absorb the attack, so the victim’s server isn’t overwhelmed by malicious traffic and brought down.
This data will also be used by Gladius to build better filtering systems, so bad traffic can be more accurately detected and blocked. Gladius tokens will be issued to members who donate their bandwidth, and these can be exchanged with websites.
Since most people have spare bandwidth anyway, it’ll cost nothing to loan out. Users will be able to generate some income from their spare bandwidth which would otherwise go unused.
Gladius will use blockchain technology to build this decentralized network of servers, with no vulnerable central point.
It’s an example of how decentralization can help create more efficient and attack-resistant systems, and will hopefully inspire similar projects in other areas of cyber security.
In an age where skyrocketing DDoS attacks are creating a pressing need for some kind of innovative response.
There’s a big gap in the market right now for a cost-effective and reliable way of responding to DDoS attacks. Companies are tired of paying extortionate fees for DDoS protection software that doesn’t even work all of the time, and worried about the consequences of increasing attacks.
Unfortunately, many security companies are just churning out the same old software with the same flaws and vulnerabilities. Gladius offers a new way of doing things avoids many of the pitfalls mentioned above, while potentially saving companies huge amounts of money. Gladius is currently holding their private presale and will be launching a public presale on November 24th.