Cloud service provider Interoute has shed some light on the work it did to protect the UEFA website from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks during the Euro 2012 football tournament earlier this year.
Interoute's private cloud platform was enlisted by UEFA to provide football fans with access to information about Euro 2012, and to run its Football Administration Management Environment (FAME) tool.
The former was used by UEFA to help manage the tournament logistics for players, sponsors and the press.
It is claimed that, during peak times at the tournament, 31,000 web pages were being access per second at UEFA.com.
Interoute said it used a three-tier security approach to protect UEFA.com and FAME from DDoS attacks, which was built into its private cloud platform.
This included the screening of data accessing UEFA's systems, which was then checked by a managed firewall service, before being checked again by Interoute's Network Intrusion Prevent Service.
"The Interoute private cloud hosting infrastructure served up over 4 billion pages to fans all over the world, with visitors viewing numbers peaking at over 31,000 pages per second," said Matthew Finnie, chief technology officer for Interoute.
"It's not just major events that attract unwanted attention online, these days every business with a digital presence is open to attack."
The prevention service looked at the data packet by type, signature and behavior, and then either allowed or blocked the data traffic as it was coming through.
"The Interoute and UEFA team worked around the clock to ensure any attacks were handled quickly and we experienced no disruption to the UEFA EURO 2012 service," said Daniel Marion, head of ICT at UEFA.
