Biomedical Science Publisher Karger Selects Incapsula DDoS Protection

We’re pleased to announce that S Karger AG has selected Imperva Incapsula to provide critical website security.

Karger, a respected medical and scientific publishing company, publishes a substantial catalogue of scientific journals and supplemental material each year to meet the demands of the scientific community. Most of its publications are available in electronic format and are referenced daily by researchers from around the globe. Karger’s website is highly sensitive to any hiccups that might derail the information flow to subscribers and users looking for timely information.

The relationship between Karger and Imperva Incapsula began last June when the publisher’s website experienced a massive distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The attack was controlled by a botnet with zombie clients all over the world. Once we shared our web application firewall and content delivery network (CDN) solutions with Karger, we were able to stabilize and secure their website and immediately noticed a sharp drop in unwanted traffic.

“We had an internal intrusion prevention system (IPS), but it was not able to detect the DDoS attacks we were experiencing,” says Karger’s IT project manager, Daniel Hangartner. “We found a 70 percent increase in traffic, most of which were log files, which indicated a paid HTTPS attack.”

In other words, Karger’s existing security system couldn’t stop the user-agent attacks without affecting their customers’ ongoing needs to access critical information. Incapsula installed its web application firewall and quickly stemmed the problem. Hangartner recalls,

“After one day of testing, our site was stable and secure. The Incapsula support team was responsive and very helpful throughout the entire process. And I’m happy to report that we haven’t experienced an attack since.”

Imperva Incapsula General Manager Marc Gaffan notes that the Incapsula team worked with Karger to implement the solution while keeping the website available. By filtering and controlling HTTPS traffic and activating DDoS Protection the team was able to mitigate the attack and restore a responsive, dynamic site.

Karger was keen on getting the system up and running quickly while being able to tackle the root of the problem—filtering and controlling HTTPS traffic. Through a streamlined implementation, we were able to mitigate the attack and get defenses in place quickly.”

In addition to Incapsula DDoS Protection, Karger.com also uses Incapsula CDN & Optimizer. This helps Karger provide fresh and dynamic content on a daily basis to its large subscription base.

To learn more about Karger’s experience, please read our case study.