Imperva Incapsula Review

In September 2013, our online store was the victim of a prolonged three-week application-level DDoS attack. Mitigating this type of Layer 7 DDoS attack is a major challenge for security solutions, since malicious bot traffic often appears to be requests from legitimate users. During this attack, our existing anti-DDoS solution was not able to effectively filter out the malicious traffic, which meant that innocent e-commerce customers were blocked from accessing the sites or were forced to unnecessarily fill out CAPTCHA challenges.

As an e-commerce company, website security is central to our core business. We needed a DDoS protection solution that would enable us to maintain "business as usual" even under attack, with minimum disruption to the user experience. Minimizing false positives was a crucial requirement, since the easiest way to lose a customer is to block her from accessing the site.

Realizing that our previous solution was not equipped to handle this type of sophisticated application-level DDoS attack, we sought a DDoS Protection service capable of correctly filtering all types of DDoS attacks from legitimate website traffic, without affecting the online experience for our customers.

During our search for a new solution, we came across Incapsula and were impressed by industry comparisons such as the one appearing on TopTenReviews.com showing the clear superiority of Incapsula over our existing service in terms of professionalism, performance and security.

We decided to give Incapsula a try and initially activated their service on our French domain. It quickly became clear to us that Incapsula was the right solution to handle the DDoS attacks that we face. After only six days, we signed a contract and moved our other domains to Incapsula's service as well.

We are now using Incapsula's always-on DDoS Protection service to secure our online stores against the largest and smartest types of DDoS attacks - including network, protocol and application level (Layers 3, 4 & 7) attacks – with minimal business disruption.

Incapsula is now a key component of our security infrastructure. When under DDoS, traffic is routed through Incapsula for screening, where malicious traffic and DDOS attacks are blocked automatically.

By using Incapsula's DDoS Protection, we have achieved concrete benefits:

• Intelligent mitigation of sophisticated application layer attacks - Incapsula uses advanced traffic analysis algorithms, granular mitigation rules and an enterprise-grade WAF to differentiate legitimate website visitors (humans, search engines, etc.) from automated or malicious clients.
• Transparent mitigation with less than 0.1% False Positives - Incapsula applies a set of progressive and non-intrusive challenges that are designed to ensure the optimal balance between strong DDoS protection and an uninterrupted user experience, without the need for annoying delay and CAPTCHA screens.
• "Always on" DDoS protection - Automatic "always on" DDoS mitigation and 24x7 monitoring are effective in stopping "hit & run" DDoS attacks can wreak havoc with solutions that need to be manually turned on and off on every burst.
• Cloud-based mitigation of network DDoS attacks - Incapsula mitigates high-volume network attacks through a global network of multi-gigabyte scrubbing centers
• Dedicated NOC team – An experienced team of Network Operations Center (SOC) engineers performs 24x7 security monitoring and assists with DDoS mitigation as needed.

Since activating Incapsula on our sites, we have solved our DDoS problem and couldn't be more pleased with our overall website performance and security. Equally important, Incapsula's technical support and commercial teams have been very responsive throughout the initial rollout phase.