Once the attack begins, websites can try to trace the sudden flood of traffic back to the source computer and filter it out, but even that's a complex process.

“Throughout the day, we tune workloads that we filter out [from the entire mass of query traffic] for attention,” he says.

XML gateways, such as the Vordel XML gateway cloud Edition, filter traffic sent up to cloud platforms, as well as apply policies to the access to the cloud services.