How to Effectively Mitigate DDoS Attacks?

Quick Summary: DDoS is a nasty attack vector that not only negatively impacts an organization’s reputation and IT infrastructure but also makes the end users frustrated, degrading the user experience. So, it is obvious for organizations to know how to prevent DDoS to avoid such scenarios. This blog compiles essential practices that can help overcome this security issue. Read on to beef up your security posture.

Every organization wants to ensure its web applications, networks, and servers run smoothly to keep their services available to the end users. However, your adversaries or attackers are always after disrupting those services. DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) is an excellent instrument for such bad actors.

It enables them to inundate your servers, web applications, or networks with lots of requests, causing disruptions in services. DDoS attacks have surged 49% since last year and organizations in the financial sector have emerged as key targets.

There is a need for a robust defense strategy to avoid such a risk. Besides, proactive measures are also important. Instead of relying solely on firewalls and security tools, you must follow the best DDoS prevention practices to protect your digital assets.

Continuous traffic monitoring, rate limiting, assessing web apps for security, and several other best practices can help you prevent the Distributed Denial-of-Service attack to ensure seamless functioning of your servers, applications, and networks.

This blog provides the best practices that will help you protect your digital assets from DDoS. Keep the ball rolling for useful insights.

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A Quick Overview of DDoS Attack

DDoS attack is a name that haunts even large organizations like Google, Meta, and Amazon. They fear losing their businesses because DDoS disrupts their services by crashing or making websites inaccessible to legitimate users.

It hasn’t been a long time since Meta’s Facebook and its subsidiaries like WhatsApp and Instagram got down for about 5-6 hours globally. This was a huge financial setback for the company, which was estimated to be around USD 100 million.

A similar incident happened to Amazon around the same period, resulting in a loss of USD 34 million. These incidents show how costly service outages can be, even for a few hours. Hence, DDoS is a true nightmare for organizations of every size.

DDoS causes an outage of services by targeting the servers, networks, and web applications of an organization with a flood of requests. Attackers use it to overload the target to make it unresponsive, crash, or prevent legitimate users from interacting with it.

Just imagine a highway intently occupied by lots of cars blocking the space for actual commuters, as depicted in the image below. Now, this jam will be termed as DDoS in the world of computing.

Though both DoS and DDoS have many things in common, there are many differences, too. In short, DoS (Denial-of-Service) is an attack in which an attacker targets a server with an excessive amount of traffic to make the website or resource unavailable. The attack source is a single computer or machine.

On the other hand, DDoS involves using multiple devices together to bombard the target server or web application with excessive traffic to disrupt the services.

There are different strategies that attackers use to make a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack successful:

• Application-layer Attacks: User-facing applications are targeted by attackers with excessive requests by exploiting vulnerabilities.
• Protocol Attacks: Attackers take advantage of weaknesses in internet protocols to overwhelm the target with excessive requests.
• Volumetric Attacks: A large amount of traffic is directed to the target to cause disruptions, packet loss, and network congestion.

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DDoS Attack Prevention Methods

As you have already seen, organizations incur huge losses due to Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks. So, making sure it doesn’t affect your organization is the best policy to avoid such risks. The following points offer tips on how to mitigate DDoS attacks to ensure you aren’t the next victim.

Implement Rate Limiting

Rate limiting is one of the most effective DDoS prevention techniques. It works by setting a threshold for traffic sources to limit or prevent excessive requests. So, a client or application can send only a limited number of requests to the server or network over a specified time period.

This restriction on the number of requests from a specific IP that reaches the threshold mitigates the risk of DDoS attacks. The excessive traffic, after the limit is reached, is either delayed or dropped. Consequently, the server or network remains available and responsive.

This is how it works in real life:

• Suppose an attacker tries to overwhelm a server or network by flooding it with requests with the use of botnets.
• Due to rate limiting, the server or network refuses requests once they reach the specified limits, preventing the potential exhaustion of computing resources.

Eliminate Potential Entry Points

The wider your attack surface, the more is the possibility of a cyberattack like DDoS. So, you must take appropriate measures to reduce the attack surface. It will help you stop a DDoS attack. The following are some strategies for DDoS prevention by reducing the exposed surface area.

• Diversify the Network: Make accessing your assets harder by segmenting the network. For this, you need to separate and distribute assets within the network. For example, you can keep web servers in public subnets and databases in private subnets.
• Add Load Balancer: Evenly distribute incoming traffic by shielding the web servers and computational resources with a load balancer. It will defend against DDoS attacks that target specific servers.
• Geographical Limitations: You can restrict the traffic from geographical locations where you don’t expect legitimate users. It will limit the overall traffic, reducing the chances of DDoS.
• Remove Unnecessary Features: Remove unnecessary or legacy features, services, or components that could be a potential entry point for attackers.

Real-Time Threat Monitoring

Continuous monitoring of networks and systems helps identify threats in real-time. It involves monitoring the network or system logs to identify anomalies that indicate suspicious activity. Consequently, you can take prompt action to mitigate DDoS attacks and other cyber threats. It can help identify patterns in network traffic and monitor unusual changes in it.

Use Black Hole Routing

One countermeasure you can take for DDoS prevention is using black hole routing. It is a security technique that routes potentially bad traffic to null or “black hole.” This way, you can stop malicious traffic from targeting your server or network and drop the traffic. It works by configuring the router to control traffic destined to or coming from a specific IP.

Set DDoS Priority

Define the relative status of different web resources to find out which are more important. It will enable you to set priority for different resources to determine which one to secure first. This prioritization will help in making quick decisions.

Categorize your web resources based on criticality and prioritization to prevent DDoS attacks. For example, data-centric web assets should be a greater priority because hackers have a higher motivation to attack them. Typically, web resources can be categorized into critical, high, and normal priorities.

Incident Response Plan

An incident response plan is like a set of guidelines that help security teams respond promptly to cyberattacks and resolve issues as early as possible. It prevents further damage from DDoS threats. With this response plan in place, the team knows how to respond and when to act. Basically, the team is aware of how to handle the situation and minimize the risk.

Security Audit

Just think of regular check-ups with your doctor. How can it benefit you? Of course, these check-ups can help you verify the status of your health and well-being. In case something in your health report is wrong, the doctor can inform you and treat the condition before it turns into a serious health risk.

Similarly, security audits evaluate the health and well-being of your systems, networks, and applications. These audits help uncover vulnerabilities that attackers exploit to launch cyberattacks like Distributed Denial-of-Service. They help avoid cyber risks with web apps, networks, and systems.

Employee Training

Attackers often use social engineering techniques like phishing attacks to hijack an account or infect a victim’s system with malware. They play with human psychology to carry out attacks like DDoS. Proper cybersecurity awareness is crucial to avoid such risks.

Employee training plays a crucial role here because it allows an organization to keep its employees updated about the key cybersecurity risks and practices. So, it eliminates unintended human mistakes that could make a cyberattack successful.

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Tackle the Challenge with DDoS Prevention Tools and Solutions

The above tips can help you effectively mitigate the risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks. However, you should combine them with the right tools to make it more effective. Let’s check out those tools.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

It works as a shield between a web application and the internet. It uses customizable policies to stop DDoS. These policies help filter, examine, and block malicious traffic. You can use WAF for your organization’s web applications to control the traffic from unwanted or specific locations. It helps mitigate a wide range of cyber risks to enhance web app security.

Always-on DDoS Mitigation

You can also choose a DDoS mitigation solution that offers continuous traffic monitoring and prevents suspicious activities. Providers of DDoS mitigation offer an ecosystem where policy changes are implemented frequently with the emerging attack patterns and traffic monitoring is always on.

To Wrap Up

Bad actors are always in search of vulnerabilities in an organization’s digital assets, like web applications, networks, and servers. If you ignore this problem and there are vulnerabilities in your digital assets, you are most likely to get hit by a cyberattack like DDoS.

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