How to Prevent a DDoS Attack

It can take ten years to build a reputation and only a few-minute cyber incident to ruin it. That’s the whole concept of the significance of security testing in a single sentence. Cyber security is one of the main concerns for every digital service.

Let’s take, for instance, DDoS attacks. There are numerous services for DDoS attack prevention. However, those working to carry out the attacks are way too creative in finding new approaches.

So, by understanding what DDoS attacks are, why they happen, and what defensive measures are available, you can decrease the likelihood of your business becoming a victim of one. And this article is a good place to start.

What Is a DDoS Attack?

DDoS stands for “Distributed Denial of Service”. It’s a malicious attempt to disturb the regular server, service, or network traffic by overwhelming the target with a flood of simultaneous requests. The result is hampering an organization’s usual business operations.

DDoS attacks are more than just a bit of extra traffic. They can involve a botnet to take advantage of malware installed on the computers of unsuspecting internet users. In doing so, they co-opt thousands, even millions of computers to attack in huge numbers, far more than a website would normally be prepared to deal with.

On the other hand, tech minds have learned to create scripts and entire platforms that make DDoSing easier. One of the latest cases is the Ukrainian IT Army which has created a tool for coordinated DDoS attacks on Russian digital infrastructure. And it’s got a pretty epic name – Death by 1000 Needles. Before that, the IT specialists from Ukraine launched a couple of casual games that allowed DDoSing while playing.

DoS and DDoS Attack – The Difference

Before moving on to the Distributed Denial of Service attack prevention, let’s learn about different types of DDoS attacks.

There are DoS and DDoS attacks; one letter but many differences. The key thing to remember about DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack is that it uses only one computer. The computer labeled as the attacker sends a flood of connections to the victim. It overloads the server memory, increases CPU utilization, or uses up all its bandwidth.

In DDoS, instead of using just one computer, an attacker can have hundreds or even thousands of devices (that’s an above-mentioned botnet). Then, the hacker can start sending TCP, UDP, or ICMP connections hurtling toward a web server. This is a much more devastating attack than DoS. Moreover, it’s much tougher to withstand.

Another difference is the speed of an attack. DoS is slower compared to DDoS because the DoS attack originates from a single location while DDoS comes from multiple ones. DoS attacks can be deployed much faster. You can trace them more easily. However, you can’t say that about DDoS attacks.

Types of DDoS Attacks

There are three types of DDoS attacks: volumetric, application-layer, and protocol attacks.

Volumetric Attack

This is the most common type of DDoS attack. Bots overwhelm the network’s bandwidth by flooding it with numerous fake requests on every available port. It prevents legitimate requests to get through. As a result, the network rejects regular legitimate traffic.

Application-Layer Attack

This type of attack is hard to troubleshoot and fix since it imitates real online traffic very closely. Instead of the entire network, it targets the web application, Internet-connected apps, or cloud services.

The application-layer attack focuses on specific vulnerabilities or issues. As a result, an app cannot display content to the user. It directly affects web traffic by targeting the HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, or SMTP protocols.

Protocol Attack

Protocol attacks are typically directed at network components that validate connections – syn-flood, ping-of-death, smurf DDoS, fragmented packet. They work by delivering pings that are intentionally sluggish or faulty. It causes the network to consume a lot of memory during the verification process. Protocol attacks can also target firewalls by transmitting massive amounts of purposely erratic data.

How a DDoS Attack Can Affect Your Business

Financial Damages

While a platform is down, people cannot use it. The purchases and the flow of users stop. The consequences can be different. In the best-case scenario, a business loses only the income it could have earned during the downtime. However, an attack can cause an outflow of clients, which is really bad in the long run.

Reputational Risks

When a case goes public, users become concerned about other, more serious, issues: potential data breaches, loss of sensitive data, etc. It all tends to cause dissatisfaction with the service. Thus, preventing a DDoS attack is always about protecting your brand.

More Serious Potential Threats

Quite often, a DDoS attack is not a one-time campaign. It can be a smokescreen for other attack vectors such as malware infestation, breaches that cause data leakage, or something more serious.

The Reasons for DDoS Attacks

Now, when the implications of DDoS attacks are well-understood, we’re going to answer the eternal question of “why”.

Unfair play by competitors. The legitimate ways to knock out competitors exhaust themselves. Some take more extreme measures, choosing DDoS attacks today. So, someone hacks your site, you lose SERPs positions and user trust, while rivals get more room for maneuvers.

Political manifestation. Oftentimes, these attacks are conducted by hacktivists with a clear civil position. Now, a particularly striking example is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian IT Army uses any vectors of DDoS attacks on Russian business corporations like Gazprom, Lukoil, Magnet, and different government services. The aims are:

• to inform Russians who are blinded by fake-news Russian media about all terrible murders of civilians in Ukraine and bombed cities;
• to contribute petitions to defend Ukrainians who are fighting for the freedom of all European people;
• to stop the Kremlin’s propaganda that justifies the war.

The hacker group Anonymous is known for using digital tools to undermine companies and governments, encouraging them to leave the dark side.

Fraud. Very often, hackers organize their own DDoS attacks to gain access to a computer and block the system. If the user doesn’t have a DDoS protection service installed, the hacker can paralyze the system completely and then demand a certain amount of money to unlock it.

How to Know Your Service Is Under Attack

The hard part about a DDoS attack is that there are no warnings at all. Usually, customers’ complaints make business owners realize something is wrong with a website. At first, it seems the problem lies with the server or hosting. The tech team starts checking. Occasionally, they notice a huge amount of network traffic with resources maxed out. In total, it can take several hours to realize it’s a DDoS attack.

The most effective way to mitigate a DDoS attack is to determine that your service is attacked at the outset. There are some signals to indicate a DDoS attack:

• the server responds with a 503 error;
• too many requests for one IP;
• TTL (time to live) times out;
• a huge spike in traffic during log analysis solutions.

Most of these signs can be used to automate a notification system that sends an email or text to your administrators.

How to Protect Your Platform from a DDoS Attack

The best DDoS protection is to be ready for one, just in case. You need to think about the security of the site even at the early stages of software development. Check the requirements carefully. Test the software thoroughly for bugs and vulnerabilities. That’s what QA services are for, and they allow preventing plenty of risks.

1. Have a Response Plan

Prepare an incident plan to respond to DDoS attacks as promptly as possible. It should include:

• clear instructions on how to react to any type of hacker attack with a step-by-step guide;
• a list of all the necessary tools that can be used during a DDoS attack;
• teams responsibilities;
• escalation protocols;
• a list of mission-critical systems.

2. Secure Your Network

Install threat monitoring systems and tools to protect your network infrastructure. Firewalls, antivirus and antimalware apps, and network monitoring software can help you keep track of the network’s baseline traffic and set up alarms during threat detection.

AWS Shield and Azure DDoS protection are two widely-used services that can help with this. They are managed DDoS protection services that can safeguard you from layer 3, 4, and 7 attacks at no additional cost. To take advantage of AWS DDoS protection, you need to make sure that you are routing your traffic through Route53 or CloudFront.

3. Mitigate Escalation

What’s important here is to leverage machine learning to understand patterns in a particular service and be able to see outliers. Those could be things like deviations from a rate perspective (gigabit for a second) or deviations from a request per second. It also can be an inability of a DDoS pot to be able to answer a challenge during a DDoS attack.

4. Have a Backup Server

Having multiple distributed servers makes it hard for hackers to attack all servers simultaneously. While they can launch a successful DDoS on a single hosting device, the rest will remain unaffected and able to take on extra traffic until the system is up.

5. Adopt Cloud-based Service Providers

Now, even though adopting the cloud will not completely prevent DDoS attacks, it will help to alleviate them. It is because the cloud has more bandwidth than on-premise resources and its structure means that many servers are not in the same location.

To Sum Up

This is the basic info about DDoS attacks you need to know. Hopefully, it will help you secure your platform and system against any ill-doings. But still, we would recommend involving QA professionals who have security testing expertise – it would be much wiser than relying on the DDoS attack prevention manuals only.