The China-based telecoms equipment giant Huawei announced last week the opening of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cloud scrubbing center located in Amsterdam, in cooperation with DDoS-prevention specialist Black Lotus. The announcement was made last Thursday during the CeBIT technology show in Hannover, Germany.

Huawei said in press conference that the center would provide protection for Tier 1 and Tier 2 network operators in Europe, and can defend against up to 160Gbps of DDoS attack traffic. Its partner, Black Lotus, has a worldwide network of scrubbing centers with a total defense ability reaching 1.4Tbps.

The two companies have called the scrubbing center in Amsterdam the first of its kind in Europe.

Pierluigi Paganini, CISO for Bit4Id, and member of ENISA’s Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group, describes the process of DDoS scrubbing as: “When a DDoS attack is detected the malicious traffic is redirected to a mitigation architecture through the cloud avoiding the affected user’s website….When a DDoS attack is detected by monitoring systems, inbound traffic is redirected to the nearest scrubbing center, the centers apply DDoS filtering and routing techniques to reduce DDoS traffic interference. The clean traffic is then routed back to the customer’s network.”

Edwin Diende, CTO of switch & enterprise communications solutions at Huawei, acknowledged the increasing severity and impact of DDoS attacks on enterprises during the press conference, which also outlined other DDoS-mitigation products Huawei would begin to offer. “Enterprises, network operators, and internet service providers (ISPs) are becoming increasingly concerned about DDoS attacks, which has resulted in the adoption of more stringent requirements for anti-DDoS solutions to provide precise and efficient protection and the ability to jointly maintain a secure network environment,” he noted.