Falling victim to the DDoS attacks can be devastating. It can lead to reputation loss, brand degradation, and lost clients, all of which lead to business failure. Hence, businesses must invest in significant resources to prevent DDoS attacks or at least reduce the risk of falling victim to such a type of DDoS attack, rather than focusing on how to stop a DDoS attack once an attack has been initiated.
If you want to know how dangerous DDoS attacks are, you can refer to the Mirai Dyn DDoS attack in 2016 or the Google attack in 2017.
In this blog post, we will be looking at what is DDoS attack and how to prevent DDoS attacks.
What are DDoS Attacks?
DDoS attack or distributed denial of service (DDoS) refers to the type of cyberattack where cybercriminals bombard or flood an IP address with vast volumes of traffic. If the IP address leads to a Web server, genuine traffic will not connect it, and the website becomes inaccessible. Another type of DoS attack is a flood attack, wherein a group of the server is flooded with requests that require processing by the victim machines. The packets are produced in huge volumes with the scripts that operate or run on compromised systems that are part of a botnet and weaken the victim servers’ resources like CPU or memory. Eventually, the attack makes the website crash, or the website goes down.
Meanwhile, you can read post on “website security trends to look out for in 2021“.
Note: You can use DDoS attack prevention and detection tool to stop a DDoS attack.
Now, as we have discussed what are DDoS attacks, let’s move ahead to view how to prevent DDoS attacks or stop a DDoS attack.
How to Stop a DDoS Attack?
Monitor For Suspicious Activity (Suspicious Activity Monitoring)
Early threat detection is one of the most effective means to prevent the attack.
Denial of service can come in various sorts and is crucial to understand its most general telltale. You can identify your website was intruded on by observing an increase in the number of spam emails or lag in network performance. On seeing the signs of suspicious activity, address the intrusion activity as soon as possible even if such deviations don’t seem important initially.
This how to stop a DDoS attack. Next section is regarding types of DDoS attacks.
Types of DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks can be categorized mainly into three types:
Volumetric DDoS attack
Volumetric DDoS attack incorporates UDP floods, ICMP floods, and other spoofed-packet floods. Cybercriminals use this type of cyberattack to flood the attacked website’s bandwidth, and the immensity is measured in bits per second.
Protocol Attacks
Protocol attacks or state-exhaustion attacks create an interruption in service by excessive consumption of either server resources or the resources of network equipment like load balancers and firewalls.
Protocol attacks use weakness in layer 3 and layer 4 of the protocol stack to render the target unavailable or inaccessible.
SYN Flood
SYN flood is one type of DDoS attack commonly used by criminals who want to pose a threat to the website. In this attack, the threat actors consume all the server resources by making them inaccessible to the genuine website traffic.
The attacker sends initial connection requests (SYN) packets to the server, but either doesn’t respond to the host’s SYN-ACK response or sends the SYN requests from a spoofed IP address. Nevertheless, the host system continues waiting for acknowledgment for each of the requests, binding resources until no new requests can be made, thereby resulting in a denial of service.
Now, as we have seen types of DDoS attacks, let’s see best practices to prevent DDoS attacks.
Best Practices to Prevent DDoS Attacks
Buy Additional Bandwidth
The most primary step to prevent DDoS attacks is to make your VPS Hosting infrastructure ‘DDoS resistant.’ You can make your VPS Hosting infrastructure DDoS resistant by ensuring that you have sufficient bandwidth to manage the traffic surge caused by malicious activity.
In the past, it was feasible to prevent DDoS attacks by making sure that you had more bandwidth at your end than any attacker was expected to have. However, with the rise of amplification, this method is no longer practical. Purchasing some additional bandwidths is not just this solution; you need other measures to be taken in place.
Practice Basic Network Security
The most fundamental countermeasure to preventing DDoS attacks is to allow as little user error as possible.
Engaging in healthy security practices can keep business networks from being jeopardized. Best DDoS attack protection practices incorporate:
- Complicated passwords that change regularly.
- Anti-phishing methods.
- Secure firewalls that permit minimal external traffic.
These security measures solely will not stop a DDoS attack, but they work as a crucial security foundation against such cyber attacks.
Suggested For Further Reading:
- How to Defend Your Business From Brute Force Attacks?
- How To Develop Security Awareness Against Simulated Attacks?
Create Redundant Network
Concentrating on a safeguarded network architecture is crucial to security. Hence, businesses should develop redundant network resources. So, even if one server is attacked, the other server can manage the network’s excessive traffic. Servers should be located in various places geographically, if and when possible, as spreading out the resource will make it more complicated for the attackers to target a system.
Meanwhile, you can read the article on what is network redundancy and why is it important?
Consider DDoS-as-a-Service
DDoS-as-a-Service offers enhanced flexibility for environments that integrate in-house and third-party resources or cloud and cheap dedicated server UK.
Simultaneously, the model ensures each of the security infrastructure components fulfills the highest security standards and compliance requirements. This model’s principal advantage is offering tailor-made security architecture for a specific company’s dedicated needs, making the top-notch DDoS protection available to businesses of any size.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you understand What are DDoS attacks and how to prevent DDoS attacks.
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