Did you know that during the past year, DDoS attacks have increased by 117%? Industries including retail, shipping, and public relations have been the most impacted by this increase, with businesses seeing significant disruptions during peak shopping seasons like Black Friday. Businesses must understand how to stop these attacks as they become increasingly common and complex.
What Are DDoS Attacks, and Why Should You Care?
A DDoS attack is one of the cyber threats that make use of compromised systems, usually botnets, which flood traffic to the target, thereby making the site inaccessible to legitimate users. The attacks can be targeted on websites and web servers, DNS servers, and even network infrastructure, causing
- Financial Losses: Denial of service attacks can also cause heavy financial losses in the form of prolonged downtime, where the figures for industries such as e-commerce or financial services may go beyond $300,000 per hour.
- Reputation Damage: A DDoS attack can erode the trust of your brand since users will be facing service disruptions.
- Operational Disruptions: Companies take hours or even days to recover from damage because of network infrastructure downtime.
Types of DDoS Attacks Include
- HTTP Floods: Bombard servers with fake HTTP requests, overloading resources.
- DNS Amplification: Exploit vulnerable DNS servers to amplify attack traffic.
- Application Layer Attacks: Target specific applications, often bypassing traditional defenses.
- SYN Floods: Overwhelm servers with incomplete connection requests.
- IoT-Based Attacks: Try vulnerable IoT devices to create massive attack volumes.
How Can You Tell If Your Network Is Being Attacked?
3 Key warning signs include:
1. Unusual Traffic Patterns
- Abnormally high traffic, particularly from unknown sources, may indicate an HTTP flood or other types of DDoS attacks.
Example: An HTTP flood attack targets web servers by overwhelming them with millions of fake requests per second from botnets, affecting server response times.
2. Performance Issues
- Sluggish response times or frequent timeouts suggest an overloaded network infrastructure under stress. If your systems struggle to load or time out frequently, they might be under strain from a DDoS attack.
Example: Customers experience delayed access to a cloud-hosted database during peak hours due to a DNS flood attack.
3. User Complaints
- Reports of website unavailability or disruptions are a red flag. Analyze traffic logs for anomalies to determine if malicious sources are at play. Multiple reports of unavailability often point to a service DDoS attack blocking legitimate traffic.
Example: Customers calling support to report login failures during a denial-of-service DDoS incident.
What Makes It Difficult to Prevent A DDos Attack?
The difficulties arise from the following key factors:
- Scale of Attacks: Massive volumes of traffic generated by distributed botnets and compromised IoT devices can easily overwhelm even the most robust network infrastructures.
- Evolving Attack Methods: Cybercriminals continuously refine their strategies, introducing dynamic vectors and attack techniques that evade traditional detection mechanisms
- IoT Exploitation: Insecure IoT devices act as entry points for attackers, providing additional computational power to amplify attacks.
- Unpredictable Traffic Patterns: Botnets distribute attack traffic across multiple sources, creating unpredictable surges that are difficult to identify and mitigate effectively.
10 Proven DDos Attack Prevention Methods
Implementing a combination of ddos attack prevention techniques can help safeguard your network effectively. Here are some proven strategies
1. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a critical line of defense, that can help in analyzing and filtering traffic at the application layer. It can block malicious HTTP flood requests and other attacks targeting web servers.
Example: A retail platform integrates a WAF to block botnet-driven traffic spikes targeting its checkout API, ensuring consistent service during peak shopping events.
2. Load Balancers
Think of load balancers as traffic directors for your network. The former takes incoming requests and then distributes them across a multiple server cluster to avoid a single point being overwhelmed by traffic.
For example, during a massive DDoS attack, a load balancer redirects traffic to unaffected servers. This keeps the website running for real users without interruption.
3. Cloud-Based DDoS Protection
Cloud-based solutions such as Azure DDoS Protection and AWS Shield are your safety nets against volumetric attacks. They scale on demand, absorbing malicious traffic before it can even reach your network.
4. Attack Surface Reduction
Reducing the exposed attack surface minimizes opportunities for threat actors. This includes:
- Blocking outdated ports, protocols, and applications.
- Restricting traffic to specific IP ranges.
- Deploying load balancers to diffuse traffic intelligently.
Example: A financial institution enforces strict access control policies, blocking unused communication channels to prevent denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities.
5. Anycast Network Diffusion
An Anycast network disperses traffic across globally distributed servers, absorbing volumetric traffic spikes and preventing single-point bottlenecks.
Example: A CDN provider employs Anycast to reroute excessive requests, shielding regional data centers from overload during a DNS amplification attack.
6. Real-Time Adaptive Threat Monitoring
Think of this as your network’s constant watchdog. Real-time monitoring tools don’t just sit back and observe—they actively hunt for unusual patterns, like sudden traffic spikes or odd activity from specific IP addresses. These tools learn as they go, adjusting to new threats and shutting them down before they cause real damage.
For example, imagine a logistics company suddenly sees its systems bogged down. Real-time monitoring detects that the problem stems from botnet traffic hijacking insecure IoT devices. The system flags and blocks those IPs, keeping deliveries on track without skipping a beat.
7. Caching with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
These store cached copies of static content, reducing the load on origin servers during an attack. They are particularly effective against HTTP floods and application-layer attacks.
Example: A video-streaming service employs a CDN to serve cached content, ensuring uninterrupted playback during high-traffic events caused by botnets.
8. Rate Limiting
Rate limiting means crowd control for your servers. It ensures that your servers are not flooded by a thousand requests at once, which is especially suspicious in nature.
For example: a medical portal that experiences an unusually high flood of requests all coming from one suspicious IP address. Rate limiting turns on, which means a certain number of requests cannot be sent by that IP and the real users are happily accessing services without any hitches. It’s a rather simple yet powerful way to just keep things running smoothly.
9. Secure IoT Devices
IoT devices are a common entry point for DDoS botnets due to weak security. Securing these devices involves:
- Regular firmware updates.
- Enforcing strong, unique credentials.
- Restricting access to trusted networks.
Example: A manufacturing firm strengthens IoT security to prevent its smart devices from being hijacked and used in a botnet-based DDoS attack.
10. DDoS Prevention Services
Providers offering always-on DDoS mitigation continuously monitor and adapt to emerging attack vectors. They combine threat detection and response with network protection.
Example: A global e-commerce giant partners with a DDoS prevention service that dynamically scales resources during attacks, ensuring no disruption in customer transactions.
How to Respond to an Ongoing DDoS Attack?
DDoS threats require a combination of immediate action and long-term preventive measures to defend against network attacks:
Checklist For Immediate Actions
Checklist For Long-Term DDoS Prevention Strategies
Frequently Ask Questions
How does a Web Application Firewall (WAF) protect against DDoS attacks?
It will block harmful network traffic by analyzing incoming requests to ensure only legitimate traffic reaches your servers, thus protecting web applications from upcoming threats.
How load balancers defend against DDoS attacks?
It balances the network traffic across multiple servers, so no server gets flooded. This reduces the chances of encountering downtime during an attack.
Why should businesses consider cloud-based DDoS protection?
It helps to automatically scale dynamically to absorb extra traffic generated during an attack, thus maintaining uninterrupted access for legitimate users.
