American cloud security and content delivery network, Akamai is expanding its presence in Australia with plans to open a new scrubbing centre in Melbourne.

The new Prolexic DDoS mitigation scrubbing centre will join Akamai’s other APAC locations – Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Osaka and Singapore.

A scrubbing centre removes malicious web traffic, enabling Akamai to fight increasingly large and complex DDoS attacks against Australian customers.

A DDoS attack aims to shut down networks by overloading it with excessive traffic or inputting malicious data.

In February 2018, software developer platform GitHub was the victim of a record-setting Memcached attack that peaked at 1.3 Tbps of attack traffic.  

Although most Australian businesses are not subject to that amount of traffic, an average DDoS attack is usually more than most can manage.

This new scrubbing centre will act as the first line of defence for Akamai’s Australian customers, processing web traffic data and redirecting any malicious threats.

The scrubbing centre will be manually staffed, offering 24-hour support to local Australian customers.