Why do companies need to ensure robust protection of their servers against DDoS attacks? To what extent do DDoS attacks damage a business's financial graph? How can DDoS prevention techniques be employed?
DDoS attacks couse a staggering loss of $34 million to Amazon. Similarly, Meta suffered a loss of $100 million.
Financial losses resulting from DDoS attacks persuade companies to invest in advanced security measures to protect their systems against similar threats. DDoS attack prevention requires utmost attention to effectively stop DDoS threats.
To prevent DDoS attacks, organizations must undertake essential measures to ensure their systems are insulated from external vulnerabilities.
Some of the best ways of DDoS attack prevention are explained in this insightful blog:
DDoS Attack Prevention: A Comprehensive Technique
DDoS prevention is critical for maintaining the seamless provision of services to users. Protection against DDoS attacks includes threat monitoring, adaptive rate limiting, reducing attack surface, and implementing scalable DDoS attack prevention techniques.
1- Reduce Attack Surface Exposure
Reducing attack surface exposure is needed to stop DDoS attacks. Here are some effective strategies:
Network Segmentation
Separate and distribute assets within your network to make them harder to target. For instance, web servers can be placed in a public subnet while database servers are kept in a private subnet. Also, restrict access to database servers from web servers, not other hosts.
Geographical Restrictions
Gephrica restrictions mean restricting your access to various countries, particularly in regions where legitimate users are less likely to be found. This helps protect your system against unauthorized users, protecting your sensitive information.
Load Balancer Protection
Load balance protection is an effective way of protecting a web or network against illegitimate access. It helps distribute incoming traffic evenly, reducing the chances of DDoS attacks targeting specific servers.
Clean Application
Cleaning an application or web service by removing unnecessary services and features helps prevent DDoS attacks. Cleaning the application reduces the attack surface and boosts your defense against DDoS attacks.
2-Apply Rate Limiting
Rate limiting is one of the significant strategies for preventing DDoS attacks. This involves retrieving several required users that can be made within the specified time frame. As rate limiting prevents the system from being overwhelmed by traffic, it reduces the propensity of DDoS attacks. Implementing rate limiting ensures that legitimate traffic is secure.
3- Create a DDoS Prevention Threat Model
Creating a DDoS threat model is essential to efficiently identify your server's risk. Here are a few steps you can adopt for creating an attack threat model:
Inventory Your Web Assets
The first step is creating an inventory of all the web assets you want to stop DDoS attacks. Ensure that the inventory sheet includes network details, domains, protocols, and the number of applications.
Identify Potential Attackers
Once the website inventory is created, it’s time to map potential attacks targeting your servers. Potential attackers may be hacktivists, competitors, or nation-state actors. It is important to identify attackers to create an effective threat model carefully.
Determine Attack Vectors
It is essential to carefully map vector attacks that an attacker could use to launch a DDoS attack. Most commonly attacked vectors are flooding, SYN flooding, and HTTP flooding. Determining vector attacks helps you to remain proactive in stopping DDoS attacks.
Evaluate Risk Level
Evaluating the risk levels associated with various sector attacks is Essential. This helps determine the gravity of the attack and its potential harm to your system. Using this information, you can prioritize the actions necessary to counter the most severe attacks.
4- Deploy Web Application Firewall
Web applications first act as a proxy between the Internet and the origin servers. It protects servers from direct exposure to malicious attacks. Numerous techniques, like IP reputation, filtering, are used to identify and block traffic from malicious servers.
A web application firewall also uses deep packet inspection to analyze the content of incoming requests, ensuring that only legitimate users are accessing the servers or networks.
5- Understanding Warning Signs
It is essential to understand warning signs effectively before full-blown DDoS attacks occur, whether caused by DDoS and DoS methods.. Most common symptoms include spot connectivity, intermittent website shutdowns, and internet disconnections. Some of the warning signs are similar to those of other problems that your system may be facing. However, if the problems persist, your system is under attack, and prevention becomes necessary.
FAQS
What is a DDoS Attack?
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is when multiple systems flood a target (server, website, or network) with excessive traffic, overwhelming its resources and making it unavailable to legitimate users.
How Can I tell if I’m Under a DDoS attack?
Signs of a DDoS attack include:
- Unusual spikes in traffic
- Slow network performance
- Website or application downtime
- High server CPU or memory usage
- Inability to access certain online services
What Are the First Steps To Take for DDoS Attack Prevention?
- Identify the attack: Monitor traffic logs and server performance.
- Notify your hosting provider or ISP: They may have DDoS protection solutions.
- Enable rate limiting: Restrict excessive requests from a single IP.
- Use a web application firewall (WAF): Filters malicious traffic.
Can I Stop DDoS Attacks Without Professional Help?
For small-scale attacks, basic DDoS mitigation techniques like rate limiting and firewalls can help. However, for large or complex attacks, professional DDoS attack prevention and detection services are recommended.
How Can DDoS Prevention Services Keep My Website Online During an Attack?
DDoS prevention services protect your website by detecting and filtering out malicious traffic before it reaches your server. They use techniques like traffic analysis, rate limiting, IP blacklisting, and global distribution networks to absorb and mitigate large-scale attacks, ensuring legitimate users can still access your site without interruption.
To put it briefly, defending your system and network against DDoS attacks is challenging, but not impossible. Adopting sane strategies as discussed above, preventing DDoS attacks is no longer a big challenge. As DDoS attacks are of various types, it is essential to map a holistic plan that enables the comprehensive curtailing of these attacks at an earlier stage.
If your system becomes vulnerable to a DDoS attack, it becomes imperative to follow DDoS mitigation defined strategies to avert major damage to your system.
Another common sign of DDoS attacks is irrelevant ads, which show that something is going wrong with your system. There are the best ad blockers for Edge that can help in shielding your system from being overwhelmed with unnecessary ads.
Stay tuned to Virtual Codes Vault for insights on leveraging advanced software to create a secure digital environment.
