Automated infrastructure firm Megaport unveiled a built-in security tool to let customers filter potentially malicious traffic.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack protection offering sees the network-as-a-service (NaaS) vendor filter traffic in the event of attacks targeting network layer (layer three) or transport layer (layer four) directly within its platform rather than having to route it through an external service.

Where traditional DDoS mitigation tools drop traffic in the event of malicious activity – taking services offline in a bid to protect the network – Megaport’s offering mitigates at the host or IP level, ensuring the rest of a customer’s network continues to operate normally.

“Network resilience is now a core infrastructure requirement, not an optional extra,” Megaport CEO Michael Reid noted. “Moving DDoS protection inside the network layer rather than treating it as a bolt-on service eliminates the traditional trade-offs between security, performance, and cost.”

Megaport provides private network connectivity to customers across the globe. It acquired Latitude late last year, leveraging the latter’s compute infrastructure to reinvent itself as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform.

Central to the company’s efforts is a focus on automation, with Reid recently telling SDxCentral that its Latitude sites are almost entirely automated, with software running the show.

“We don't have any staff ... no staff are on site at all at any one time, unless there’s an outage or there’s an issue with a server that comes offline, and we replace that,” Reid said.

Megaport’s decision to launch a DDoS protection tool comes as attacks are on the rise.

DigiCert stats showed that threat actors were increasingly aiming for cloud-hosted domain name system (DNS) or ultra-DNS, services, while Cloudflare snared a handful of sequentially increasing attacks culminating in Aisuru, the apex of botnets that measured at 15.72 Tb/s and 3.64 billion packets per second (Bpps).

Megaport leans on its core tenet of automation to ensure customer networks are kept up and running, with its Protection tool coming with pre-configured profiles designed to reduce the need for manual tuning. Megaport also claims it can be added by users via its Megaport Portal “in under 60 seconds.”

“It takes users less than a minute to deploy Megaport Internet, and its native DDoS protection works to keep digital services available and high-performing regardless of external threats,” Reid added.