What is DDoS and How to Protect Against DDoS Attack?

How to Protect Against DDoS Attack

Cyberattacks have soared in recent years. But DDoS attacks and other cyberattacks are preventable. Keep reading to learn about DDoS attacks and how to protect against DDoS attack.

What Is the Definition of a DDoS Attack? 

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a malicious effort to reduce a targeted system’s accessibility to authorised end users, such as a website or application. Attackers often produce a lot of packets or requests, which eventually overload the target system. In the event of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault, the attacker creates the attack using several hacked or controlled sources.

Types of DDoS Attacks 

Attacks at the Infrastructure Layer (Layer 3 and Layer 4)

Infrastructure layer attacks are the most prevalent type of DDoS attack. They typically refer to attacks at Layers 3 and 4. They include User Datagram Packet (UDP) floods and other reflection assaults like synchronised (SYN) floods. These assaults try to overwhelm the network’s or the application servers’ capacity and are often quite huge in number. But thankfully, these are the assaults that also have recognisable signs and are simpler to spot.

Attacks at the Application Layer (Layer 6 and Layer 7)

Application layer assaults are often used to describe attacks at Layers 6 and 7. These assaults are becoming increasingly sophisticated yet less frequent. Even while the number of these assaults is often lower than that of attacks on the infrastructure layer, they tend to target specific costly areas of the application, rendering it inaccessible to actual users. For instance, a barrage of HTTP requests to a login page, a pricey search API, or even XML-RPC floods from WordPress (also known as WordPress ping back attacks).

How to Protect Against DDoS Attack Using These Techniques

Reducing Attackable Surface Area

Reducing attackable surface area to restrict attacker choices and enable the construction of defences in a single location is one of the first methods to reduce DDoS assaults. We must make sure that no ports, protocols, or applications are opened up for our applications or resources from which they do not anticipate receiving any communication. thereby reducing the potential attack locations and enabling us to focus our mitigation efforts. You may sometimes do this by routing direct Internet traffic to certain components of your infrastructure, such as your database servers, and hiding your processing capabilities behind Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) or Load Balancers. Other times, you may restrict the traffic that reaches your apps using  the next generation firewall or access control lists (ACLs).

Plan For Large Scale Volumetric DDoS Attacks 

The two main factors to take into account when preventing large-scale, volumetric DDoS assaults are server attack-absorbing capacity and bandwidth (or transit) capacity.

Bandwidth Capacity 

Ensure your hosting provider has a sufficient number of redundant Internet connections so you can manage high traffic levels while you are architecting your apps. DDoS assaults’ main goal is to reduce the availability of company resources and apps, so you should position them near both your end users and significant Internet exchanges so that people can easily access them even when there is a lot of traffic. The usage of CDNs and smart DNS resolution services, which offer another layer of infrastructure for providing content and answering DNS requests from places which are typically closer to your end customers, can also be used.

Server Capacity 

 It is crucial that you can rapidly scale up or down on your computer resources since the majority of DDoS assaults are volumetric attacks that use a lot of resources. You may do this by using greater processing resources or those with characteristics like better networking or more extensive network interfaces. In order to avoid overwhelming any one resource, load balancers are often used to continuously monitor and distribute loads among them.

Identify Normal Traffic Patterns 

The absolute baseline is to be able to accept only as much traffic as our host can manage without compromising availability if we notice excessive amounts of traffic hitting a server. This is referred to as rate limiting. By examining each packet individually, more sophisticated security systems may go one step further and intelligently admit only authorised traffic. To do this, you must be able to compare each packet to a baseline of the quality of excellent traffic that the target typically gets.

Use Firewalls to Protect Against Advanced Application Attacks

Using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a smart idea in order to protect your application against threats like SQL Injection and cross-site request forgery. Additionally, given the distinctiveness of these assaults, it should be simple to develop tailored mitigations against erroneous requests that could pass as genuine traffic, originate from malicious IP addresses, come from unexpected geographic locations, etc. The ability to examine traffic patterns and develop tailored defences with the aid of skilled support may sometimes be useful in preventing assaults as they occur.

Large scale DDoS attacks are a tough blow for companies of all sizes, capable of shutting down the most successful businesses. With increasing digital dependance, DDoS assaults will continue to rise. Companies must learn how to protect against DDoS attack and develop DDoS protection and mitigation strategies if they want to survive and thrive.