Managing a cloud-based business amidst growing cyberattacks is like trying to raise a sheep among a pack of wolves. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) risks are becoming one of the largest cyber security challenges for businesses moving applications to the cloud. Effective endpoint solutions for DDoS protection can help you actively manage such attacks.
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This Article Covers
- What Is DDoS Protection?
- OSI Model Attacks
- Threat Categories
- Key Features
- How To Protect Against DDoS Attacks
- Threat Mitigation Stages
What Is DDoS Protection?
DDoS protection is the process of building up your defenses on a virtual network against DDoS attacks. DDoS solutions offer multiple capabilities to safeguard cloud applications on several threat layers. But let’s first understand what a DDoS attack is.
A Denial of Service or DoS attack is a cyber threat that uses a single system to affect the availability of targeted systems like applications or websites to end users. DDoS attacks follow the same pattern, except the attackers use multiple compromised sources to penetrate and attack the target. The idea is to overwhelm systems by generating large volumes of requests or packets.
OSI Model Attacks
DDoS attacks can occur at different layers of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. You can segregate these attacks and categorize them based on the layers they target.
| Layer | Application | Vector Example |
|---|---|---|
| 7. Application | Data | HTTP floods |
| 6. Presentation | Data | SSL attacks |
| 5. Session | Data | Portmapper Vulnerabilities |
| 4. Transport | Segments | SYN floods |
| 3. Network | Packets | UDP reflection |
| 2. Datalinks | Frames | Smurf attacks |
| 1. Physical | Bits | WEP attacks |
DDoS attacks are most common at the Network, Transport, Presentation and Application layers.
Threat Categories
DDoS threats are constantly evolving and adapting to modern defense systems. However, you can sort them into four different categories:
- Volumetric attacks are flood-based attacks that you can notice at layers 3, 4 and 7.
- Asymmetric attacks involve one-sided or stateless UDP traffic.
- Computational attacks generally consume CPU and memory via Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
- Vulnerability-based attacks specifically target and exploit software vulnerabilities.
Key Features
Let’s look at the key features of a DDoS solution:
Real-time Monitoring
You can constantly monitor your applications with real-time monitoring capabilities to find indicators of DDoS attacks. DDoS solutions can help mitigate the attack as soon as they find any sign of the threat.
Also, you can get detailed reports about the attack and complete threat analysis. Integration with security information and event management (SIEM) provides real-time system monitoring during an attack.
Multilayered Protection
DDoS protection software offers protection to all the layers of your system by integrating with a web application firewall (WAF). The platform can protect against attacks in layers 3 and 4, while WAF protects at layer 7.
Attack Metrics
Some solutions provide attack metrics in real time. For example, you can access summarized metrics through Microsoft’s Azure monitor. It provides detailed attack insights with mitigation reports and mitigation flow logs.
Threat Alerts
You can configure alerts to keep your defense mechanisms aware of potential attacks. These alerts and notifications indicate the beginning and end of an attack.
How To Protect Against DDoS Attacks
Minimize Attack Surface Area
You can focus your defense mechanism in a single place instead of diversifying it by minimizing the attack surface area. The platform ensures that your applications don’t communicate with unsolicited and unknown sources to reduce points of attack.
Plan Accordingly
Transit capacity and server capacity are the two most important factors in mitigating large volumetric attacks. You need enough redundant internet services while creating applications to handle high traffic. The main goal of a DDoS attack is to prevent your applications and websites from performing, so you must locate them close to end users and also at huge internet exchanges that provide access to the applications during high traffic.
Also, since most volumetric attacks use a huge amount of resources, it’s crucial for you to scale up and down computation resources swiftly. Make sure you properly distribute the load among resources to avoid overloading. Load balancers can help you do just that.
Determine Your Traffic
Rate limiting is the concept of accepting only the traffic load the host can manage before affecting availability in times of elevated traffic levels. Best DDoS solutions can analyze these individual packets and only accept legitimate traffic to avoid overburdening your website. Understanding the aspects of good traffic can help you segregate and compare packets.
Deploy a Web Application Firewall
Using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a healthy practice for maintaining a robust cyber security defense system. It prevents attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS), cookie poisoning and SQL injection that try to exploit your application’s vulnerabilities.
Also, behavioral patterns of attacks help you understand and create customized protection systems against malicious requests that disguise as good traffic or get generated through bad IPs.
Threat Mitigation Stages
DDoS mitigation is the process of minimizing the consequences of DDoS attacks and preventing any devastating impact on your systems.
Early Detection
Even the tiniest irregularities and deviations in traffic can result in a DDoS attack, so it’s crucial to recognize an attack as early as possible. Manual detection might fail to catch slightly unusual behavior in network traffic.
User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) lets you detect abnormal behavior and integrates with machine learning to find anomalies in servers, routers and endpoints.
Quick Response
After detecting DDoS attacks, the system identifies and drops malicious traffic and absorbs the rest of the traffic. Domain name system (DNS) routing can divert traffic from intended targets like the server and mitigate risks in both the network layer and application layer.
Proactive Analysis
You must safeguard your business against future DDoS attacks. The best way to do that is to use system logs and analytics to analyze attack behavior and examine your security measures. Additionally, you can access shared analytical information from various cybersecurity community platforms to get more resources to understand the threat landscape better.
Final Thoughts
You can no longer ignore cybersecurity risks associated with the rapid development of cloud-based applications. Organizations are now moving towards a hybrid approach in their DDoS protection architecture to combat these risks. For example, F5’s DDoS application provides on-premise defenses to protect layers 3, 4, 5 and 7. The cloud component, on the other hand, has the capability to mitigate risks against volumetric attacks.
In order to choose the best DDoS protection and mitigation methods to safeguard your applications, we recommend making a requirements checklist depending on the size, cyber security budget and risks associated with your business.
Which DDoS protection measures do you use to safeguard your organization? Let us know in the comments below!