Case Study: Fortune 100 Insurance Company Defeats Application Layer DDoS with Shape Security

Fortune 100 Insurance Company - Customer Case Study

Fortune 100 Insurance Company relied on its website to help more than 20 million members find provider, benefits, and plan information, but a prolonged application-layer DDoS attack flooded the search function with automated queries and caused the site to fail. Existing network-layer DDoS protections from Shape Security’s environment did not stop the attack because the traffic looked like legitimate user activity and was spread across thousands of IP addresses.

Shape Security’s solution, including the Shape Protection Manager, identified the traffic as automated and deflected all attack requests before they reached the origin servers. As a result, the insurer restored normal website operations, prevented the search function from timing out, and stopped the attack’s broader impact on shared backend resources; Shape blocked 85% of total traffic immediately upon deployment and successfully thwarted a second wave of attacks as well.