What are DDoS Attacks and Best Practices to Avoid Them?
DDoS attacks are no less than a nightmare for businesses and individuals, relying heavily on their website to generate business and leads. Falling a victim of a successful DDoS attack can cause huge damage, as much as $100,000 for every hour.
Not only the businesses suffer loss in terms of cost but also result in brand degradation and loss of customers. What are DDoS attacks and how to prevent them will be discussed in this post?
First, let us have a look at what are DDoS attacks.
What are DDoS Attacks?
DDoS is the short form of Distributed Denial of Service. It is a form of Cyber Attack that is intended to make a machine or network resource inaccessible to its intended users by permanently or temporarily disrupting the services of a host connected to the internet.
Another form of DDoS attack in which a group of servers is bombarded with requests to be processed by infected machines. Scripts running on infected machines that are part of botnet generate the requests, causing to exhaust the victim’s server resources like memory or CPU.
After having a brief overview of DDoS attacks, here are some ways to avoid it. Let’s have an overview.
Opt for Higher Bandwidth
In order to prevent DDoS attacks, the first step is to looking forward to your infrastructure. “DDoS resistant” is to make sure that you have adequate bandwidth to handle massive traffic inflow caused by malicious activities.
DDoS attacks normally take place due to the high volume of traffic. By opting for higher bandwidth offered by “Mediacom Internet” to handle sudden traffic overflow, can prove to be helpful. Although, the solution is quite expensive, as higher bandwidth will go unused in most of the cases.
DDoS attacks have gone complex and large with the passage of time; no volume of bandwidth will be able to prevent attacks beyond one Tbps without DDoS mitigation processes. However, higher bandwidth can provide some sort of protection to the impact of the attack, allowing you to get extra time to overcome the attack.
Control and Obstruct Malicious Traffic
When you know the DDoS attack is underway, there are plenty of ways to guard their infrastructure. To stop DDoS attacks, you need to halt malicious packets from scattering to servers by “null routing traffic”. It will help drop and redirect requests swamping in under the way of a botnet.
In addition, DDoS optimized firewalls can recognize partial connections and filter them from the system on reaching certain limits. Routers can also be set to limit and prevent the servers from being overcrowded. In some cases, the traffic is redirected to a “Scrubber” that filters appropriate requests from malicious ones.
Integrate ISP Idleness
Depending on a sole ISP can be susceptible to DDoS attacks because any outbreak that disturbs the provider’s system will surely experience stoppage for linked systems. Besides, when a DDoS attack is deployed on a single ISP connection, there are plenty of resolutions that do not include detaching and waiting until the outbreak is dismantled.
For instance, ISP redundancy offered by Internet Service Provider can help enterprises to form redundant networks that permit them to shift between different providers in case of DDoS attack occurs.
Leverage a DDoS Protection Appliance
The majority of security vendors including Cisco and Fortinet offer appliances that act as a defender of network firewalls to prevent DDoS attacks before they can disrupt the system.
The appliances use various techniques such as blocking abnormal traffic, carrying out traffic behavioral baselining and blocking traffic centered on known attack signatures. The major drawback of adopting this approach to prevent DDoS attacks is that appliances are limited to the amount of traffic they can handle. However, high-end appliances are capable enough to monitor traffic coming in at a rate of up to 80Gbps.
Conclusion
In the coming years, we are going to see more devices being linked to networks each year. DDoS attacks should not be taken lightly as it is a constant threat for organizations working in different industries.
Timely actions and responding appropriately can help organizations from DDoS attacks in order to avoid a huge financial upset. If you have not taken the steps, make sure to do now before it’s too late
