Attempting to access a brand’s website only to see a blank white screen or error message is confusing at best, and frustrating at worst. Depending on the circumstances, it might even drive customers to spend their hard-earned cash or precious time visiting the competition instead.
That’s why brands and businesses have to implement cloud DDoS mitigation strategies to avoid poor user experiences that lead to revenue loss.
Cloud mitigation, or distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, refers to the systems and practices used to minimize threats and protect networks and servers.
Cloud mitigation, or DDoS mitigation, refers to the systems and practices used to minimize threats and protect networks and servers.
Effective DDoS mitigation helps businesses prevent costly service disruptions and extended downtime. Companies use DDoS protection tools to secure network infrastructure, websites, and applications to prevent attacks.
First, what is a DDoS attack, and why does it do so much damage? To initiate a DDoS attack, cybercriminals flood websites and servers with requests in order to exhaust the target’s resources. The intentional flooding causes service delays and interruptions that hurt performance. DoS attacks can cause delays and outages for hours and even days.
Effective DDoS mitigation requires a thorough understanding of the different types of attacks and the ways they occur. Below, we break down the three types of DDoS attacks and their intentions.
The perpetrator overwhelms the target network bandwidth with what appears to be legitimate network traffic. They aim to overwhelm the network and its infrastructure by inundating it with excessive traffic, preventing real traffic from flowing. Volumetric attacks usually result in network congestion and service disruptions.
Protocol attacks rely solely on exploiting vulnerabilities in network protocols to disrupt the surrounding infrastructure. The perp leverages server resources, firewalls, load balancers, or other communication supports by targeting their capacity with malicious requests.
Application layer, or Layer 7 (Open Systems Interconnection model), attacks targets by disrupting a specific website or online service to steal sensitive data or gain unauthorized access. They often impair affected systems more than volumetric and protocol attacks because it’s harder for anyone to detect them until it’s too late.
Three stages typically occur during the cloud, or DDoS mitigation process. While the specifics of each unique situation may vary, the three stages follow.
Organizations need to be able to identify traffic flow abnormalities as soon as possible. The detection stage presents the opportunity to identify an attack instantly or spot its build-up before it spirals. Monitoring network traffic and using DDoS protection services can facilitate early detection.
Once an organization sniffs out the sign of an attack, it must respond. This stage could include sending malicious traffic elsewhere through rerouting techniques, blackholing traffic to an IP address that doesn’t exist, or scrubbing incoming traffic for DDoS threats. No matter which response an enterprise chooses, the goal is to block an attack while preserving the user experience for real visitors.
After an attack, businesses have to review system logs and analytics to improve resilience and address gaps in their systems. Even if mitigation fails, learning from past threats helps prevent future ones.
Preventing DDos attacks or catching them early remain the best ways to restrict the ramifications. Enterprises should use the following techniques to protect themselves against DDoS attacks.
Limiting attack surfaces reduces potential points of entry. Consider closing unnecessary ports, turning off unused services, and enforcing strict access controls to ensure your infrastructure is equipped to prevent malicious traffic. By narrowing the overall attack surface, you make it more difficult for attackers to locate these resources and exploit potential vulnerabilities.
Rate limiting refers to setting thresholds and limiting the amount of traffic a server or network can process from a single source. This strategy prevents any single entity from overwhelming a network or server to conduct a DDoS attack. When setting rate limits, configure them to avoid blocking legitimate traffic so as not to interfere with a quality user experience.
Your infrastructure should accommodate varying levels of traffic without degrading performance or availability. In the event of a volumetric attack, systems still need to handle the large volume of traffic to maintain continuity for real visitors. The ability to quickly scale resources up or down can help mitigate the effects of a DDoS attack in real time.
DDoS protection software provides an advanced layer of defense against criminal traffic. Solutions often offer features like traffic analysis, anomaly detection, and automated response mechanisms, which help quickly address and neutralize threats.
Here are some of the best practices to keep in mind to avoid DDoS attacks, ensure cloud security practices, and cloud DDoS protection.
DDoS protection tools monitor web traffic, deploy filtering mechanisms to detect malicious traffic, and lessen DDoS threats, while simultaneously maintaining an optimal user experience. Companies turn to these tools to support site functionality and prevent disruptions due to high traffic volume.
To qualify for inclusion in the DDoS protection category, a product must:
* Below are the top five DDoS protection platforms from G2’s Summer 2024 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
Cloudflare Application Security and Performance helps businesses block DDoS attacks and bad bots. Organizations that use Cloudflare can turn on DDoS protection in minutes to protect their websites and applications. Cloudflare also offers an Under Attack hotline to customers for immediate assistance with DDoS attacks in real time.
“Cloudflare has been great in securing and managing our domains and sites from one simple dashboard. It has provided great uptime and performance analytics to our websites very reliably. Many more tools like speed testing, DNS records, caching, routes, and more have helped us monitor our site and user experience. Their customer support is also as fast as their speed.”
- Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Review, Rahul S.
“The only thing I dislike about Cloudflare is whenever I add a new domain, it takes 2-3 hours to update the DNS records.”
- Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Review, Animika S.
Businesses use DataDome to protect their websites, mobile apps, and application programming interfaces (APIs) against DDoS and denial of service (DoS) attacks, fraud, account takeovers, scraping, or scalping. With DataDome, yiu can block Layer 7 DDoS threats in real time and deploy a mitigation strategy in minutes.
“DataDome has been super helpful in identifying and blocking bot activity on our site. Without DataDome technology, we'd have to build a lot ourselves, but now we use our engineering resources on product features and not blocking bot activity! The customer service and technical teams are always very responsive when we have questions, making it easy to use and adapt to our changing needs.”
- DataDome Review, Sara M.
“The solution struggles somewhat in preventing manual scraping efforts.”
- DataDome Review, Kubra N.
HAProxy is an enterprise software load balancer with features for protection against DoS and bot-based attacks. Their patented software, HAProxy ALOHA, offers powerful defensive mechanisms against packet flooding. Additionally, HAProxy provides global rate limiting at the connection or application layer.
“I enjoy having an interface without extra frills or anything fancy. It makes it simple to input your config, easy to check the status of your applications, and quick to deploy. When you have questions or need configuration assistance, the ALOHA team does an excellent job helping.”
- HAProxy Review, Austin E.
“Some more complex configurations are still command line interface (CLI) and/or manually editing configs. I'd like to see more added to the graphical user interface (GUI) so people newer to the product can pick it up quicker. This is just a nitpick, though.”
- HAProxy Review, Brandon M.
Radware DefensePro provides automated DDoS protection to defend against high-volume, fast-moving, encrypted, and very short-term threats. With its patented behavior-based technology, Radware DefensePro empowers organizations to detect attacks as they happen while minimizing false positives.
“What I like most about DefensePro is its ability to detect network traffic in real time, which allows it to detect patterns and strange behaviors that may indicate an attack in progress, thus protecting the organization's web solutions. Among its advantages is allowing legitimate traffic from an organization and blocking malicious traffic that may be generated from that organization, allowing us to receive the truthful information necessary for our business normally.”
- Radware DefensePro Review, Humberto C.
“For the version of DefensePro that we currently have, performing the secure sockets layer (SSL) inspection consumes a lot of resources, which causes slowness.”
- Radware DefensePro Review, Jorge Antonio B.
Webroot DNS Protection stops malicious traffic and malware at the domain name system, (DNS) layer before infiltrating an organization’s networks, endpoints, and end users. It creates highly secure and private internet connections and automatically blocks inbound malware and DNS-based attacks.
“We go with Webroot DNS Protection to improve the security and privacy of our customer's DNS requests. DNS visibility is excellent as we can gain insights into the applications in use, customer visits, session metrics, and event logs. Since it's a fully-managed DNS solution for security, each request is scanned for malicious actors, and threats are dismissed before entering our application servers.”
- Webroot DNS Protection Review, Meghna S.
“I wish I could have more granularity in selecting specific block settings. There are times, particularly when working with clients in the legal profession, when more access to restricted sites is needed. The ability to ‘unlock’ certain blocks for some time so that we don't have to remember to go back and re-engage would be helpful.”
- Webroot DNS Protection Review, David Y.
While traditional firewalls can help mitigate some types of attacks, they may not be sufficient to protect against large-scale DDoS attacks. Cloud-based DDoS mitigation solutions offer more advanced protection and scalability.
The cost of cloud-based DDoS mitigation varies depending on the specific needs of your organization. However, the benefits of improved security and reduced downtime often outweigh the initial investment.
Cloud-based DDoS mitigation solutions employ advanced techniques such as global anycast networks, advanced threat detection, real-time traffic scrubbing, and web application firewalls (WAF).
DDoS attacks can cause significant damage, including financial loss, reputational damage, and business disruption.They can render websites and online services inaccessible, leading to lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction.
DDoS attacks can make or break customer experience. Familiarize yourself with DDoS attacks and how they work to implement mitigation techniques that can prevent downtime. For the best results, consider implementing DDoS protection software to monitor traffic, stop malware, and stay ahead of threats.
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