Knowing how to stop DDoS attacks can make a huge difference between your business’s success and failure. That is said because the impact of any DDoS attack can be pulverizing, causing your organization to vanish from the web and become incapable of communicating with the customers.
If you succumb to a DDoS attack, you are not alone. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults are very common nowadays and they keep on growing in terms of size, frequency, and intricacy, undermining businesses and specialists throughout the globe.
A typical DDoS attack includes bombarding an IP address with a lot of traffic. If the IP address is connected with web servers, it will get overwhelmed and all the genuine traffic heading towards the webserver will not be able to get in touch with it, and the webpage will get inaccessible. So what to do to stop DDoS attacks? Continue reading to know.
What are DDoS attacks?
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) is a malicious attempt for disturbing genuine traffic coming on a server or organization by overwhelming huge internet traffic. This malicious traffic is produced from numerous sources that are arranged from one main central point. The way that the traffic sources are disseminated frequently from various locations and countries makes these attacks a lot harder to obstruct than one starting from a single IP address.
DDoS assaults accomplish viability by using various systems as wellsprings of assault traffic. These systems can be PCs or other machines, such as IoT devices. From the birds-eye view, a DDoS attack resembles an unforeseen traffic jam halting the movement on an expressway, keeping standard traffic away from reaching the destination.
How do DDoS Attacks Work?
DDoS assaults are performed by organizations having connected-to-internet machines. These networks are composed of PCs and various other devices, (for example, IoT devices) that have been tainted with malware, permitting them to be controlled remotely by the attackers. Right after setting up the botnets, attackers are ready to attack by sending distant guidelines to every bot.
When the victim’s servers get targeted by the botnets, every bot sends requests to their IP address, conceivably making the server or organization become overwhelmed
that eventually results in the delay of the service. Since every bot is authentic, differentiating the malicious traffic from the regular one gets difficult. DDoS attacks are normally estimated in bits per second and till now, the biggest attack has surpassed a terabit each second.
Types of DDoS Attacks
1. Volume-based
This is a very common type of DDoS attack, which practices a huge measure of traffic to overwhelm your bandwidth and makes it incapable of dealing with genuine traffic and not allowing them to access the website. Assailants do this volumetric DDoS attack for totally exhausting till the final capacity of the network.
2. Protocol-based
These kinds of DDoS Attacks are created for targeting the processing capacity of any organization assets like firewalls, servers, and load balancers by zeroing in on Layer 3 and 4 protocols. In this attack, the parcels are made for making communicating servers get engaged and have zero reaction during regular protocols.
3. Application-based
The vast majority of malicious attacks targets to attack the application layer – Layer 7 and DDoS attacks are no exception. In these kinds of DDoS attacks, attackers use shortcomings in the application programming or web server software that drives the server to crash eventually.
One of the most common DDoS attacks includes starting incomplete solicitations for making servers utilize restricted resources and then jam all the legitimate requests.
Top 10 Ways to Stop DDoS Attacks
1. Early Identification
On the off chance that you run your server, you will be more likely to check whether you are under attack or not. This is because as soon as you discover the problem with your site, the sooner you can stop the DDoS assault. For achieving this, it’s required for an individual to acclimate themselves with how regular inbound traffic looks like.
The more you get the awareness of what your typical traffic resembles, the simpler it is to spot the malicious traffic. Most DDoS attacks start as sharp spikes within hours, so one has to differentiate between an unexpected flood of genuine guests and the beginning of a DDoS assault.
2. Increasing the Bandwidth
It for the most part bodes well to have more data transfer capacity by increasing the bandwidth of your web server. That way, you can oblige abrupt and unforeseen traffic in rush hour that could be an aftereffect of malicious activities.
Regardless of whether you overprovision by 100% or 500%, the DDoS will not stop. In any case, it might give you a couple of additional minutes to act before your assets are totally overwhelmed.
3. Defend at Network Perimeters
Following are some of the most crucial steps that can be taken instantly to mitigate the effect of DDoS attack on your server and regular incoming traffic:
- Setting the rate limit of your router to prevent the router from getting overwhelmed.
- Adding filters to the router from dropping various packets from different bots.
- Timeout partial requests and connections instantly
- Drop all the malicious packages.
- Configure SYN, ICMP, and UDP flood drops.
However, these steps were effective in the past but the latest DDoS assaults are usually huge and robust enough to overcome these actions. Once more, the most you can expect is that they will get you a brief period as a DDoS assault increases.
4. Contact the ISP or Hosting Providers
The subsequent stage is to call your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or hosting provider and reveal to them you are enduring an attack and request help. Contingent upon the strength of the attack, the ISP or host may as of now have identified it and will resolve the same.
It’s always a good idea to contact them because their data centers have larger bandwidth along with high-capacity routers and also the customer support will probably have more experience dealing with such attacks.
Moreover, having your server hosted with any provider will narrow down the DDoS traffic towards the webserver. In this way, your other services, such as email and voice over IP (VoIP) services will work normally. The first thing servers will do for preventing the websites from large attacks is executing the “null route” to your traffic. This drops all the packages arriving at your server.
5. Pen Down an Action Plan
The most ideal approach to guarantee that your website responds fast and adequately to stop a DDoS attack is to make an action plan that mentions all the details and a pre-arranged response that can be executed right after the identification of the DDoS attack.
This ought to incorporate the activities defined above, with contact names and numbers of every individual who may act to stop the DDoS attack. Also, there are several DDoS mitigation organizations as well that can prevent DDoS attacks along with empowering users to react against the attack.
6. Hiring Someone In-house
You can go with hiring in-house security experts with Layer 7 experience for preventing any kind of DDoS attack or other security threats on your website or server. A dedicated individual can screen attacks and make moves effectively.
An easy shortcut for achieving the same or even better results is utilizing managed application security vendors to put a full stop to all the DDoS attacks. Along with getting 24*7 services, users will get the following:
- Detecting the threats in real-time along with defeating the applications from various vulnerabilities.
- Running penetration tests periodically.
- Execution of Web Application Firewalls for blocking small attacks.
- Tracking the malicious behaviors and detecting the attacker in the first place.
- Monitoring processes regularly and keeping the eye on crucial information, such as IP addresses, User IDs, and GEO locations to detect attacker’s methodologies and blocking them before they do any harm.
7. Monitor Traffic Regularly
Nothing can help you as much as inspecting the traffic continuously for preventing DDoS attacks. Experts are quick to note the immediate traffic spikes in rush hours and conclude whether it is from bots or not. In the end, such checking conveys noteworthy information about attackers that can be used in improving DDoS defense policies.
8. Deploy Protection Tools
Network layer DDoS attacks exploit the network and engage them continuously by transferring lots of server packets. Else, they jam the bandwidth by engaging it beyond its ability. On the other hand, application-layer attacks are comparatively lesser in terms of volume but they end up making more damage.
Deploying WAF
Deploying a Web Application Firewall is an effective and reliable way of preventing websites and servers from DDoS attacks. They are so protective because they manage Layer 7 traffic and regularly feed all the information directly to cybersecurity professionals.
They efficiently analyze the malicious set of traffic instantly that can potentially bring the server down. Right after the detection, they initiate the process of blocking other such attacks based on IP addresses and other criteria.
9. Run Vulnerability Assessments
It is always a better move to find the vulnerabilities before malicious attackers do. These assessments include the identification of security exposures for resolving them and ensure the prevention from DDoS attacks or for cybersecurity in general.
Assessments can also be done by taking the inventories of various devices in a network and scanning their purpose, information, and checking if any vulnerability has ever happened because of them. In addition, executing these processes will help organizations to measure future risks.
10. Checking Early Signs
Identifying the signs of DDoS attacks in the early stages will help you in a lot of grounds for taking potential actions and reduce the associated damage. Uneven connectivity, reduced performance, and regular crashes are the symptoms that indicate that a web application is under DDoS attack. You should make all your team members aware of such signs so that the issues can be reported as soon as possible.
Also, it is worth mentioning that every DDoS attack is not of high volume. Several low-volume attacks that come with shorter durations occur frequently. These attacks are intended for making distractions and disturbance. Right after creating such distractions, other malicious software such as ransomware can potentially make its way into your environment.
Conclusion
Distributed Denial-of-Service or DDoS are malicious attempts that distract the regular and genuine traffic by engaging the server or sending tons of packets for not allowing websites to handle the traffic. They utilize several botnets with unique IP addresses and therefore, make it impossible for organizations to identify such attacks in the early stages.
There are 3 types of DDoS attacks. The one based on volume collectively sends a huge amount of traffic to overwhelm the bandwidth. The protocol-based DDoS attacks target the processing capacity and incapacitate layers 3 and 4. However, a majority of the attacks are application-based and they affect layer 7, making the servers crash eventually.
The blog has included the top 10 widely used and reliable ways for stopping DDoS attacks on your website so that no attacker can hamper your genuine traffic and leads. These ways include increasing bandwidth, identifying their symptoms, defending the perimeters, and hiring experts.
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