What is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), and how can we protect the network environment? | Article

Guarding Against Chaos: Strategies to Shield Networks from DDoS Assaults

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is like a traffic jam on the internet highway. Imagine you’re driving your car on a busy road, but thousands of other cars suddenly start swarming onto the same road, clogging up the lanes and causing gridlock. In the digital world, this is what happens during a DDoS attack. Instead of cars, it’s a flood of data packets overwhelming a website or online service, rendering it inaccessible to legitimate users. Hackers orchestrate these attacks by using networks of compromised computers, known as botnets, to flood the target with an overwhelming amount of traffic.

To protect against DDoS attacks, network environments employ various strategies such as deploying dedicated DDoS mitigation solutions, using firewalls and intrusion prevention systems, and collaborating with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter out malicious traffic before it reaches the target. Additionally, implementing redundancy and failover mechanisms can help ensure that critical services remain available even during an attack. Overall, DDoS protection involves a combination of proactive measures to detect and mitigate attacks in real time, safeguarding network environments from disruption and downtime.

‘Decoding DDoS: Exploring the Threats Lurking in the Digital Domain’

There are four phases of mitigating a DDoS attack.

Each phase needs to be in place and functional to defend against the attack.

• Detection – to stop a distributed attack, a website must subsequently distinguish an attack from a high volume of regular traffic if a product release or other announcement has a website swamped with legitimate new visitors. The last thing the site wants to do is throttle them or otherwise stop them from viewing the content of the website. IP reputation, common attack patterns, and previous data assist in proper detection.
• Response – in this step, the DDoS protection network responds to an incoming identified threat by intelligently dropping malicious bot traffic and absorbing the rest of the data traffic. Using WAF page rules for application layer (L7) attacks or another filtration process to handle lower-level (L3/L4) attacks such as mem-cached or NTP amplification, a network can mitigate the attempt at disruption.
• Routing – By intelligently routing traffic, an effective DDoS mitigation solution will break the remaining traffic into manageable chunks preventing denial-of-service.
• Adaptation – A good network analyses traffic for patterns such as repeating offending IP blocks, particular attacks coming from certain countries, or misusing specific protocols. A protection service can harden itself against future attacks by adapting to attack modes.

Core filtering techniques that support DDoS Mitigation:

• Connection Tracking
• IP Reputation List
• Blacklisting and Whitelisting
• Rate Limiting at the Edge
• Adequate to the environment Next-Generation Firewall with Smart Policy

‘Navigating the DDoS Landscape: Insights into Attacks and Defence Mechanisms’

Choosing a DDoS mitigation service

Traditional DDoS mitigation solutions involved purchasing live on-site equipment and filtering incoming traffic. This approach consists of buying and maintaining expensive equipment and relies on a network capable of absorbing an attack. If a DDoS attack is large enough, it can take out the network infrastructure upstream, preventing any on-site solution from being productive. When purchasing a cloud-based DDoS mitigation service, evaluate specific characteristics.

• Scalability – a practical solution must be able to adapt to the needs of a growing business and respond to the ever-increasing size of DDoS attacks. Attacks larger than 1 TB per second (TBPS) have occurred, and there’s no indication that the trend in attack traffic size is downward. Cloudflare’s network can handle DDoS attacks 10X larger than have ever happened.
• Flexibility – creating ad hoc policies and patterns allows a web property to adapt to incoming threats quickly. The ability to implement page rules and populate those changes across the entire network is a critical feature in keeping a site online during an attack.
• Reliability – much like a seatbelt, DDoS protection is something you only need when you need it, but when that time comes, it better be functional. A DDoS solution’s reliability is essential to any protection strategy’s success. Make sure that the service has high uptime rates and site reliability engineers working 24 hours a day to keep the network online and identify new threats. Redundancy, fail-over and an expansive network of data centres should be central to the platform’s strategy.
• Network Size – DDoS attacks have patterns across the Internet as particular protocols and attack vectors change over time. A vast network with extensive data transfer allows a DDoS mitigation provider to analyse and respond quickly and efficiently, often stopping attacks before they occur. Cloudflare’s network runs 10% of the Internet, creating an advantage in analysing data from attack traffic around the globe.

Here are 10x common DDoS attacks and ways to protect against them:

1. Volumetric Attacks: Floods the network with a high volume of traffic.
   Protection: Implement traffic filtering and rate limiting to mitigate the impact of large traffic volumes. Employ a content delivery network (CDN) for distributed traffic handling.
2. UDP Floods: Floods the network with User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets.
   Protection: Deploy stateful inspection firewalls or intrusion prevention systems (IPS) to filter out illegitimate UDP traffic. Utilize UDP flood protection features in network devices.
3. SYN Floods: Exploits the TCP handshake process by sending a flood of SYN requests.
   Protection: Configure SYN cookies or implement SYN flood protection mechanisms in firewalls and routers. Utilize rate limiting to control the number of incoming connection requests.
4. HTTP Floods: Overwhelms web servers with a large number of HTTP requests.
   Protection: Implement web application firewalls (WAFs) to filter out malicious HTTP traffic. Utilize rate limiting and CAPTCHA challenges to identify and block suspicious requests.
5. DNS Amplification: Exploits open DNS servers to amplify traffic directed at a target.
   Protection: Disable open DNS resolvers or configure access controls to limit queries. Implement DNS rate limiting and use DNS filtering services to block malicious requests.
6. NTP Amplification: Abuses Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to amplify traffic towards a target.
   Protection: Disable unused NTP services or restrict access to trusted clients only. Implement rate limiting and packet filtering to block NTP amplification attacks.
7. SSDP Reflection: Exploits Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) to amplify traffic towards a target.
   Protection: Disable SSDP services on vulnerable devices or implement access controls to restrict SSDP traffic. Utilize packet filtering and rate limiting to block SSDP reflection attacks.
8. ICMP Floods: Floods the network with Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo requests.
   Protection: Implement ICMP rate limiting and filtering to block excessive ICMP traffic. Configure routers and firewalls to drop ICMP packets from suspicious sources.
9. Slowloris: Exploits the server’s maximum concurrent connection limit by sending partial HTTP requests, tying up server resources.
   Protection: Configure web servers to limit the maximum number of concurrent connections per client. Implement request timeouts and connection rate limiting to detect and block slow HTTP attacks.
10. Application-Layer Attacks: Target specific applications or services with high-volume requests or resource-intensive attacks.
    Protection: Use web application firewalls (WAFs) to detect and block malicious application-layer traffic. Implement rate limiting and anomaly detection to identify and mitigate application-layer attacks in real time. Regularly update and patch software to address known vulnerabilities that attackers may exploit.

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