The kind of attacks on DDoS or distributed denial of service are mostly not recognized when compared to the kind of attack from the early days. The motive of those attacks was mostly to attack in volumes with the intention of causing embarrassment and disruption for a brief period. As of today, DDoS attacks have become increasingly unclear in terms of their motives. The techniques of such attacks have become pretty complicated and they are happening more frequently than before.
The evidence of this can be seen in the case of automated attacks, wherein attackers switch the vectors quicker than a human or an IT-based solution gets to respond. Due to the size of the attack combined with its frequency and duration, they pose significant threat to the security of online organizations.
Even if the attack lasts for ten minutes, it can have significant impact on the delivery of essential services. Upon combining these factors, it becomes clear why DDoS attack defense has become so crucial today.
DDoS Cloud Scrubbing
When it comes to DDoS attack defense, companies have to find a solution that incorporates DDoS cloud scrubbing. In this kind of defense against DDoS attack, a cloud service diverts the traffic from the data center of the organization during an attack. It also eliminates malicious traffic while providing defenses against denial-of-service attacks before restoring the legitimate traffic via ISP.
DDoS Threat Intelligence
Another important element of DDoS defense is the threat intelligence. Without it, companies will have to depend on guesswork or blind mitigation for DDoS attack defense. Using threat intelligence, organizations will be able to identify the common threat that is about to hit the network.
Appropriate tools for DDoS Attack Defense
Companies must accord adequate attention to DDoS attack defense tools for the sake of security. These tools allow them to figure out the most common kinds of attacks that requires DDoS defense. There is a certain kind of DDoS attack defense that is necessary to deal with an amplification attack which is different from a stateful flood. Altogether, a comprehensive solution for defenses against denial-of-service attacks is one that blends technology as well as processes to succeed. It requires the presence of the following.
- Gear that is dedicated and on-premises and remains vigilant 24/7.
- An expert incident team that responds as well as reacts to any kind of attack.
- The cloud that offers a destination for diverted traffic.
A list of seven dos and don’ts has been provided below to ensure proper DDoS attack defense.
Document the resiliency plan
Resiliency plans incorporate technical competencies and a comprehensive plan outlining the way of continuing business operations in the face of defenses against denial-of-service attacks. The incident response team must establish and document methods of communications that includes making key decisions. These decisions span across branches of the organization to notify key stakeholders accordingly.
Recognize activity pertaining to DDoS attack defense
Large and high-volume attacks are just one kind of DDoS activity. There are short duration and low-volume ones as well. These attacks are launched mostly by hackers for stressing your network and finding out vulnerabilities. Before implementing the DDoS attack defense, you must understand the patterns of network traffic in real-time.
Don’t assume the large-scale and volumetric only
A proper DDoS attack defense is one that is sophisticated. The objective of these new-age attacks isn’t just to cripple your website but also to distract IT security staff. The DDoS defense needs to deal with more nefarious network infiltrations like ransomware. Such attacks usually span for a short duration. In other words, they can slip under the radar undetected or unmitigated by a traffic monitor, or even some DDoS attack defense.
Don’t be overly dependent on traffic monitoring
Noticing a spike in traffic is easy. What’s not easy is distinguishing between good and bad traffic. Even when there is a spike, it isn’t possible to block out the bad traffic only. Doing so might overwhelm the resources of your network. Setting thresholds and Monitoring traffic are therefore not the only DDoS attack defense to root for. There are small and sub-saturating attacks that may not be noticed by setting threshold.
Don’t depend on a firewall or IPS
A firewall or an intrusion prevention system (IPS) won’t provide the necessary DDoS attack defense. A firewall claiming to be anti-DDoS attacks can block them in only one manner – using indiscriminate thresholds. When you hit the limit of the threshold, every app and every user that uses the port gets blocked leading to an outage. Attackers are aware of block the good users in this manner and ultimately achieving the end goal of denial of service.
Those this method of attack is quite popular but if you’ve used intelligent Web Application Firewall provided by a good web security company such as Indusface, attacker will have no chance to exploit this method as the WAF security implemented by these companies monitors web traffic very carefully and prevent you from SQL Injection, XSS attack and malicious upload before even happening by blocking the attacker’s IP.
Engaging with mitigation providers
Many ISPs offer DDoS attack defense in the form of a value-added service as well as a premium service. You need to find out under which category whether your ISP falls. Don’t forget to reach out to your ISP before the attack. If you don’t have DDoS defense are already under attack, your ISP won’t be able to sign you up immediately followed by blocking the DDoS traffic.
You can also purchase an DDoS attack defense that is on-premises or virtual. DDoS defense is equipped with diverse possibilities of deployment. It can be by means of an on-premises anti-DDoS appliance as well as a virtual machine (VM) instance.
Pairing of time-to-mitigation and successful protection from attack
While developing your resiliency plan and choosing a DDoS attack defense method, time-to-mitigation has to be of adequate importance for making decisions. DDoS attack defense is a useful adjunct to automated DDoS mitigation solution. However, mitigation services are not sufficient when they are alone.
This is because the DDoS attack needs to be detected prior, before the service is engaged. Also, it takes around 20-30 minutes for redirecting “bad” traffic, which in turn allows nefarious activity during that interval. During a DDoS attack, time is very important. DDoS attack defense is required even if the attack spans for just a few minutes or even tens of minutes.
