TL;DR – Gladius is taking a decentralized approach to combat DDoS attacks and boost website performance (CDN). There are a huge market and great team with a working alpha. We recommend this ICO for several reasons – see below.
DDoS attacks – an overview
In Q2 2017, the U.S took a whopping 122.4 million DDoS attacks. For the entire world, DDoS attacks were up by 28%. There were a number of big, high-profile DDoS events this year, including an attack on the Al Jazeera news network which resulted in some users being unable to access the website. A number of South Korean banks also received emails demanding that they pay up to $315,000 or face DDoS attacks on their servers.
When it comes to DDoS attacks, everyone in the internet business is a target. From being an idle pastime for software nerds living in the basement, DDoS attacks are the go-to weapon for cybercriminals, and even by governments for cyber warfare.
What’s worse, is that the quantum of DDoS attacks is also growing. According to a Deloitte Report, the largest attacks in 2013 was around the 300 gigabits per second mark. In 2014, this number went up to 400 gigabits and 500 gigabits in 2015. Last year, this number grew exponentially – two attacks crossed the 1-terabit-per-second mark.
Protection measure of today
For companies, this kind of service disruption can be catastrophic. Just a few hours of downtime can mean massive financial losses, and make them look incompetent and vulnerable.
So how can we defend against these disasters? There are a few existing methods but, as the above figures suggest, they haven’t been working all that well.
One method, known as blackholing, simply involves diverting all the site’s traffic to a far-off destination, a digital black hole, so to speak.
The problem with this is that although it prevents harmful traffic from bombarding the servers, it blocks all the good traffic too. Other methods aim to separate the good from the bad traffic, which isn’t amazingly accurate, and decentralizing the server to share the load, which is expensive and vulnerable to more sophisticated attacks.
There’s clearly a gap in the market for a more effective response to DDoS attacks, and maybe a dire need for one.
The Gladius approach
The Public pre-sale of Gladius, set to launch on the 24th of November, aims to transform the way DDoS attacks are dealt with.
It’s based on the idea that current methods of trying to block spam traffic are going about things the wrong way. Instead, Gladius plans to increase the ability of servers to withstand huge levels of malicious traffic, so any attacks will be futile.
How will it achieve this?
Basically, Gladius is building a CDN, a content delivery network. This is a distributed network of servers that will allow users to share their bandwidth with each other.
DDoS attacks are successful when the flood of spam traffic overwhelms the target server’s bandwidth, so simply increasing the bandwidth of the server should thwart the attack.
With Gladius, users will be able to donate or ‘rent’ their spare bandwidth to others on the network, allowing victims of DDoS attacks to temporarily take advantage of their peers’ bandwidth to help safely absorb the incoming traffic.
Spare bandwidth
Most people have spare bandwidth. The average household uses less than 200GB of data per month, which is quite a bit less than many plans allow. So there’s no real downside to loaning out some bandwidth (unless you exceed the fair usage limit, which seems unlikely).
And with Gladius, there’s something to be gained. As well as the warm, fuzzy feeling that stems from helping your fellow internet users, users that provide bandwidth will be rewarded with Gladius tokens (GLA).
These tokens can then be sold back to websites, allowing users to profit from their spare bandwidth at no extra cost to themselves.
Gladius have used blockchain technology to help create this decentralized network and allow for more seamless sharing of data between separate servers. It could well revolutionize the way DDoS attacks are confronted, and save businesses huge amounts of money.
Our Take – Take a bet on Gladius
We believe that Gladius is a rare blend of futuristic blockchain tech, with a present-day real-world usage. Given all the bad rep cryptocurrency has in the mainstream media, projects like Gladius are helping to prove that cryptocurrency and the related technology can be a real force for good, and help to significantly reduce levels of cybercrime.
Gladius aims to fill a big and potentially lucrative gap in the market, addressing a pressing need for a more effective response to DDoS attacks. There’s a lot of room for growth, and the chance to get involved in a company that looks set to make some big waves.
If the team can pull off business development and growth even to a moderate scale, investors will have great ROI. But more than that, it will be a blockchain use case that solves a real problem, affecting small businesses, right up to governments.
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