Case Study: Karger Publishers achieves DDoS protection and faster site performance with Imperva Incapsula

Karger - Customer Case Study

S. Karger AG is a Basel-based medical and scientific publisher (founded 1890) that serves a global audience with hundreds of thousands of articles and a large base of institutional subscribers. In June 2015 the Karger website was hit by massive application‑layer HTTPS DDoS attacks from a botnet, producing a 70% traffic spike dominated by malicious requests; the company’s internal IPS could not detect or filter the attacks without blocking legitimate customers, causing site timeouts and severe availability issues.

Karger deployed Imperva Incapsula’s web application firewall and CDN — the only vendor able to filter and control HTTPS traffic — and made a short proxy-related application change with Incapsula’s support. The site was back online quickly and immediately saw a drop in unwanted traffic; performance stabilized, no further attacks occurred, and overall page delivery improved through CDN caching and optimization.

Karger

Daniel Hangartner

IT Project Manger