Best practices for effective defense against malicious traffic

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise and hackers continue to pivot to outwit cybersecurity. Since the onset of the pandemic, there’s been a spike in DDoS attacks that’s remained consistent as the number of remote workers (as well as vulnerable devices and attack vectors) are higher than ever before.

Taking a proactive approach to minimizing the risk of an attack on your organization’s network could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue and mitigation.

Understanding DDoS Attacks

Distributed denial of service attacks, more commonly known as DDoS attacks, occur when hackers send overwhelming amounts of traffic to a server, causing a disruption in online services. DDoS attacks are designed to prevent users with legitimate interest from accessing and utilizing a website.

The attack is carried out by a hacker organizing and sending a flood of internet traffic to a specific location via hundreds to millions of bots, forming what’s known as a “botnet.” The unsustainable amount of traffic quickly overloads the server.

These bots come from a multitude of hacked devices, such as laptops, tablets, and even the Internet of Things. Ultimately, the attack will render a website useless.

If you’ve heard the slang term “break the internet”, you can use that logic to understand a DDoS attack. A story, tickets to an event, or a photo may suddenly become so popular that the server hosting the object in question “breaks” under the weight of high traffic influx and users are temporarily unable to access the site.

In a DDoS attack, the high traffic doesn’t come from users with legitimate interest, but instead from malicious traffic sent to cause harm.

Types of DDoS Attacks

The most common types of DDoS attacks are volume-based attacks, protocol attacks, and application layer attacks.

Volume-Based Attacks: These DDoS attacks aim to flood a network with massive amounts of traffic, overwhelming its capacity to handle requests from users with legitimate interest. You could liken this type of attack to a highway jam packed with empty cars, making it impossible for a manned vehicle to pass.

Protocol Attacks: Protocol attacks send a flood of requests to target systems, causing it to slow down or crash. These target weaknesses in network protocols or services, like DNS amplification (fake DNS lookup requests) or ICMP floods (repeatedly initiating a connection to the server and abandoning before connection happens). In these instances, network resources are depleted on illegitimate requests.

Application Layer Attacks: These aim at overwhelming specific parts (usually critical systems) of a website or application, like login pages or search functions. They don’t need a lot of traffic but can be very focused and damaging, like many people all asking a website for something complex at once.

Identifying DDoS Attack Symptoms

Early detection of an active attack will help your security team respond quickly with DDoS mitigation.

Common Signs of a DDoS Attack

The early signs that your server has become the target of a DDoS attack can be mistaken for a slow internet connection or an innocent hiccup with the website host.

Here’s some signs that your network’s bandwidth is under significant stress, possibly because of malicious traffic.

• Unusually high traffic volume
• Slow or unresponsive website
• Network connectivity issues or unexplained outage
• A large number of requests to various forms or other critical systems of your site
• An influx of spam emails, especially in conjunction with other signs
• Connection requests from malicious IP addresses

Tools for Detecting DDoS Attacks

For the highest level of prevention, an organization should use special tools that are designed to monitor network traffic patterns and identify anomalies.

Some examples of available tools are cloud-based protection, web application firewalls, load balancers, and network flow analyzers. These systems play a critical role in stopping an attack before it happens.

Preventative Methods for DDoS Attacks

Your organization can take a proactive approach to preventing DDoS attacks by minimizing your risk as much as possible. Here’s how.

Follow Network Security Best Practices

Network security protocols include keeping software up-to-date and using firewalls. Your business might also utilize an intrusion detection system, designed to detect abnormal patterns associated with DDoS attacks. They analyze incoming network traffic to identify suspicious activities.

Attack Surface Reduction

Attack surface reduction focuses on limited exposure. This leaves hackers with fewer ways to access and attack your network systems. There are multiple ways to do this and some include network segmentation, firewalls, regular updates, multi-factor authentication, and secure VPNs.

Real-Time Threat Monitoring

Consistent log monitoring can go a long way in identifying threats in real time. Log monitoring can help pinpoint threats by analyzing traffic patterns via network device logs, security, system, and application logs.

Caching

Caching caps the number of requests to your server in a given period of time (per second, for example) which can help prevent overwhelm. A Content Delivery Network can work in tandem as a preventative by standing in the gap between the user and the origin server as an application layer, offering an extra level of security.

Rate Limiting

Like caching, rate limiting puts a limit on the number of times someone can perform an operation on your website. Rate limiting either blocks or delays an IP address from performing a repeated action back to back. This helps protect your server from being overwhelmed by malicious traffic.

Web Application Firewall

Web Application Firewalls can be host, network, or cloud-based and operate like a fence around your infrastructure. WAFs monitor, block, and filter out traffic based on a set of rules, keeping potential threats at bay.

IP Blacklisting and Whitelisting

An IP blacklist is an active, monitored list that blocks certain IP addresses from accessing your network. The list can be temporary or permanent and is used as a filter for malicious traffic.

IP whitelisting is the opposite end of the spectrum, dealing with allowance rather than blocking. An IP whitelist operates off a certain set of criteria that enables an IP address to gain access to all or part of your network.

Third-Party Help

DDoS mitigation providers can help implement, monitor, and update tools that operate as preventatives against an attack. Real-time monitoring and implementing multiple tools or softwares to protect your network is often best handled by third-party specialists.

Create a DDoS Threat Attack Model

Creating a threat attack model to identify and analyze potential risks is of critical importance. Use the following steps to create an attack model.

Inventory Web Assets

Inventorying web assets involves creating and maintaining a comprehensive list of everything that makes up a website or web application. Your list will be helpful for monitoring and as a security checklist in the event of a breech. Assets include things like web servers, CMS, and SSL certificates, to name a few.

Identify Potential Attackers

A threat attack model profiles DDoS attackers and their target systems so businesses can protect preemptively. A business can define potential hackers by target systems and motivating factors. Examples could be hacktivists motivated by a political agenda, competitors in your industry, and nation-state actors.

Identify Attack Vectors and Surfaces

Attack vectors are paths that attackers can use to gain unauthorized access to your systems. Identifying these methods will enable you to minimize exposure to things like User Datagram Protocol (UDM) flooding, SYN flooding, and HTTP flooding; all of which are avenues of sending malicious traffic that super exceeds the regular traffic your server is used to.

This method of sending internet traffic can negatively affect your surfaces, such as hardware infrastructure, network topology, and software stacks.

Evaluate Risk Level

Lastly, take all of your findings and assess the probability of an attack occurring. Assign prioritization levels for which web resources need attention to enhance DDoS security. While no plan is foolproof, the lack of planning leaves your door open for an expensive and potentially lengthy cyberattack.

Post-Attack Recovery and Analysis

Here’s the best practices for how to return to normal business operations after becoming the victim of an attack.

Continue Monitoring

Continue real-time monitoring of your systems and other network assets for any further suspicious activity. Secondary attacks happen, and businesses shouldn’t let their guard down if they’ve been hit.

Update Your DDoS Plan

Planning for an attack and experiencing one are two different things. Once the dust settles, evaluate and add to your DDoS plan with any lessons that were learned, including vulnerable surfaces and areas of weakness.

Be Proactive

The number one best practice after recovery from an attack is to continue to remain vigilant and proactive about monitoring for future attack prevention.

Conclusion

DDoS attacks are a serious threat to businesses today. With hackers continually evolving to surpass cybersecurity measures, organizations have to do everything they can to safeguard against threats. Using special tools and techniques, as well as employing best practices and third-party experts, your business can keep a leg up on cyber threats.

For assistance navigating how to protect your network, get in touch with us.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best solution for DDoS attacks?

The best solution for DDoS attacks is a proactive approach in preventing them. Businesses can utilize multiple cloud and host based tools to safeguard their network from attacks.

How can I distinguish between regular traffic spikes and a DDoS attack?

The difference between a traffic spike from legitimate interest and malicious traffic can be distinguished by the volume of the spike and the length of time. Normally, DDoS attacks will cause an overwhelming spike sustained for more than an hour, whereas a regular traffic spike should be a smaller peak for a shorter period of time.

What are common signs that my website is experiencing a DDoS attack?

Common signs of a DDoS attack are overwhelming traffic spikes, slow or unresponsive web pages, an influx of spam emails or forms, or a website that is suddenly unavailable.