Since 1967, Mashreq has provided banking and financial services to millions of customers and businesses. With a growing retail presence in the region, including Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain as well as representative offices worldwide, awareness of the bank has increased along with the likelihood of DDoS attacks.

Mashreq has relied on the DDoS detection and DDoS protection services of its own security infrastructure, however, with DDoS attacks against financial institutions becoming larger and more intense, the bank took a proactive step to add more robust DDoS protection. Now, as a Prolexic client, when attacks become too large or complex to handle internally, it can draw upon Prolexic's industry-leading 500 Gbps cloud-based mitigation platform and technicians based at the company's Security Operations Center.

ted internal resources, are no match for today's complex application layer or high packet-per-second attacks," said Neal Quinn, chief operating officer at Prolexic. "Having additional DDoS defenses in place is critical for protecting hosted sites in the banking and financial services sector in light of the recent surge of attacks on this industry."

DDoS Attacks on Financial Services Sector Increases in Q1 2012

According to the Prolexic Global Attack Report Q1 2012 compiled by the Prolexic Security and Engineering Response Team (PLXsert), financial services sites were hard hit by DDoS attacks in Q1 2012. During Q4 2011, over 168 trillion bits of data and 14 billion packets of malicious traffic were identified as targeting financial services clients. In Q1 2012, 5.7 quadrillion bits of data and 1.1 trillion malicious packets were identified and successfully mitigated, representing a 3,000% increase in malicious packet traffic over Q4 2011.

"Prolexic has observed that DDoS attackers are taking a more direct strategy and focusing on specific targets such as financial services," Quinn said. "Mashreq's adoption of Prolerolexic's DDoS protection services illustrates how financial services firms can be proactive against online threats."

Recent DDoS attacks on banks in the UAE illustrate the urgency for online financial services firms and their hosting providers to be well prepared with DDoS defenses. Recently, both domestic and global sites of UAE banks were hit with an application layer (Layer 7) attack of 10 Mbps for approximately 10 days, resulting in intermittent site performance issues.

David Horton, Head of Strategy at Mashreq, said, "Given the recent increase in DDoS attacks against banks locally and globally, Mashreq engaged Prolexic as a protective measure for attacks that our internal resources may not be equipped to handle. Recently recognized as 'The Best Regional Retail Bank', Mashreq has market leading online and mobile banking solutions for its customers, so protecting these services against disruption is of paramount importance to us. The age old advice certainly applies here - prepare for the worst and hope for the best."