Press release

"Collective approach to internet attacks big success in the Netherlands"

Follow-up funding from NLnet helps "National Washing Facility" scale up

Dit persbericht in het Nederlands

The NaWas initiative (short for "Nationale Wasstraat", which is Dutch for National Washing Facility), a collective effort to handle large scale internet attacks on targets in the Netherlands, will receive follow-up funding from NLnet foundation. NLnet is the original not-for-profit responsible for introducing the internet in the Netherlands in the eighties.

The money will be used to fund a new expansion of the Nationale Wasstraat. NaWas is a initiative of ISP organisation NBIP aimed at hosting providers, midsize ISPs and users, providing a collective solution against so called DDoS attacks. NaWas is used to filter out large amounts of fake internet traffic as used by attackers to bring down internet services.

By pooling resources NaWas has vastly more bandwidth and more advanced anti-DDoS equipment from different vendors than could be afforded by each participating internet provider or user. The capacity for handling attacks is shared by the participating organisations. The system went live since March 2014, and already needs to be expanded because of the large interest in the market place.

NaWas is clearly meeting a huge need, states Alex Bik, chairman of NBIP, Not only do we see a large demand for connecting to NaWas, but NBIP also gets many invitations to speak at conferences on how it helps protect our national digital infrastructure.

Marc Gauw, general director of NLnet, is also very pleased with the success of the initiative: It helps more organisations to adequately shield themselves against DDOS attacks, while the internet traffic itself doesn't leave the country so the data of the users is not unnecessarily exposed to prying eyes of foreign actors.

NBIP — as a not-for-profit — is offering the NaWas service at cost price for both internet providers as regular users. This makes it a very welcome alternative for buying ones own anti-DDoS equipment, or using a commercial anti-DDoS service.

More information about NaWas