A website is usually where you meet your customers for the first time.
Even a slight downtime causes a poor user experience and negatively impacts revenue. Ensure that your website is up to welcome potential customers to your platform.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is like a traffic jam created by a herd of buffalos standing in the middle of a road. It disrupts your commute while making the road unavailable for transit. Similarly, malicious hackers bombard a website with massive traffic and requests, making it unavailable for legitimate users.
Many organizations use DDoS protection software to prevent and mitigate attacks on their network or systems. Avoid falling victim to DDoS attacks with reliable defensive mechanisms.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack disrupts the normal traffic flow of a targeted server, network, or service by flooding the target or its surrounding infrastructure with massive traffic or requests, exceeding its handling capacity.
This leads to abnormalities in a website’s functionality and disrupts its availability for business.
DDoS definition
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is a cyber attack that malicious hackers use to target a server, network, or service with multiple requests, making it temporarily or indefinitely unavailable for intended users.
Think of DDoS as loads of garbage dumped into a drain leading to clogging. During an attack, malicious hackers attempt to send a vast traffic flood to the target, disrupting its regular operation. Hackers increase DDoS effectiveness by sending attack traffic through several compromised systems.
When your server is under a DDoS attack, it experiences a high traffic flow from a malicious source, which makes the server crash. A hacker doesn’t need to install any code on a victim’s computer. They simply use multiple compromised machines on their botnet that send several pings to the target. This makes it seem as if many systems were trying to connect to a service simultaneously.
Botnet: A network of hijacked systems infected with malware. Malicious hackers can remotely control botnets and use them to spam or launch DDoS attacks.
Companies have a hard time defending against DDoS attacks performed through compromised systems using multiple IP addresses. Organizations need sophisticated DDoS protection tools to defend against such attacks.
Below are some famous examples of DDoS attacks.
For a DDoS attack to be successful, it needs a few elements.
It requires a hacker to control several online machines. Computers and other machines, like IoT devices, are then infected with malware, which turn them into a bot under the hacker’s control.
Once the machines are under the hacker’s control from a remote location, the hacker can perform several hostile acts. For instance, while targeting a victim’s IP address, each bot responds by sending requests to the target. This results in the targeted network or server being over capacity, causing a denial-of-service to normal traffic.
Cybercriminals benefit from the usual behavior happening between network devices and servers. They concentrate on edge networking devices like routers and switches instead of individual servers.
Suppose you’re consistently getting spam calls on your mobile. During this time, your phone would be unavailable for receiving calls from people you know. The same happens during a DDoS attack. The victim becomes unavailable to respond to genuine traffic while dealing with incoming traffic flood from compromised systems.
Since every compromised system or bot is a legitimate device on the Internet, the traffic looks normal and is tricky to separate from genuine traffic driven by intended users.
An APDoS attack is related to advanced persistent threats that last for weeks and observe petabits of traffic directed toward primary or secondary victims. Hackers often switch between multiple targets to evade DDoS mitigation measures. Organizations need specialized DDoS countermeasures to protect themselves against such attacks.
Although attackers target multiple devices, their primary focus rests on a single victim. They have control over powerful network resources that help them conduct a prolonged attack while driving a multitude of traffic to primary and secondary targets.
Many vendors offer booter or stresser services with a simple front end that are promoted as stress testing tools. Threat actors, especially those who aren’t as technically sound, can use them to converge a DDoS attack on your systems.
Such services use botnets that can produce traffic ranging from five to 50 Gigabits per second, which can disrupt an average home user’s access to the Internet.
DDoS attacks can have a serious impact on a website’s availability for business. They hinder a website’s ability to be operational and productive, resulting in heavy losses of genuine traffic.
Attackers do this for many reasons. Below are some of the common DDoSing motivations that inspire malicious hackers.
Hacktivism involves hackers displaying their criticism over government or private entities they disagree with. They perform a DDoS attack on their website to bring it down.
Less technically sound hackers are often the prime suspect of such attacks where they use DDoS attack tools for assaulting their targets.
Anonymous, one of the most popular hacktivist groups, were responsible for a cyber attack against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in February 2015.
Some DDoS attacks are sponsored by the government to silence critics or internal opposition. Governments also use them to disrupt the financial, healthcare, or administrative infrastructure of rival countries or associations.
Because the government backs them, they employ tech-savvy professionals to execute the campaign, supported by ample funding and authority.
Some attackers or organizations unethically use DDoS to impact rival websites’ availability and settle scores in unfair competition. Gaming websites often observe such attacks toward their server or other players.
A DDoS assault against a player is likely executed by malicious software. Stressors and booters are primary suspects in attacks against gaming servers.
Teenagers or bored adults also perform DDoS attacks to vent their anger. They often target people or institutions who have, in their eyes, troubled or wronged them. Attention seeking can also be a motivating factor to use DDoS, awarding attackers with respect and recognition from their peers.
These attacks often use preset scripts and tools or denial-of-service as a service and are available for as low as $10 from multiple vendors online.
Cyber vandalism can also lead to extortion when an attacker demands money or some gain in exchange for stopping a DDoS attack.
Attackers have developed multiple techniques over the years to perform DDoS attacks. These techniques are broadly classified into three categories:
Volumetric DDoS attacks generate massive traffic and drive it to the victim’s system or service. Malicious hackers’ primary purpose is to saturate a website’s bandwidth, preventing any legitimate traffic flow. The magnitude of these attacks are measured in bits per second (BPS).
Below are some common volumetric attacks.
Application layer DDoS attacks are more sophisticated and exploit vulnerabilities in the application layer. They open up connections and initiate processes and transaction requests that utilize ample disk space and memory.
These attacks include seemingly legitimate requests that aim to crash a web server. Application layer attacks comprise GET/POST floods, low-and-slow attacks. These target Windows, Apache, or OpenBSD vulnerabilities. The magnitude of such attacks is measured in requests per second (RPS).
These attacks are sometimes referred to as Layer 7 (Open Systems Interconnection model) attacks. They work in a slower fashion than other DDoS attacks. Because they’re slower, they appear like an actual request to the user, until it’s too late and the victim is too overwhelmed to respond.
Application attacks are often severe and lead to maximum data loss since they’re inexpensive to operate and more difficult for companies to detect.
HTTP flood: A Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) flood is an example of an application layer attack. Attackers exploit seemingly genuine HTTP, GET and POST requests to target an application or a server.
They require less bandwidth to bring down a website as compared to other spoofing or reflection techniques. When a server or application allocates maximum resources to a single request, it enhances the effectiveness of a DDoS attack.
Protocol attacks use existing server resources or those of firewalls, load balancers, and other intermediate communications. The attacks consume the capacity of network infrastructure resources by targeting layer three and layer four protocol communications with malicious requests.
A synchronize (SYN) flood is a type of protocol attack. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection is established through a three-way handshake process. SYN flood attacks circumvent this process and overwhelm the server’s resources, resulting in a crash.
In TCP connections, clients make an initial SYN request and the server replies with an acknowledging (SYN-ACK) response. The client completes the handshake with a final acknowledgment (ACK).
SYN flood makes multiple SYN requests and leaves the server hanging without giving the final acknowledgment. As these half-open connections increase, so does the load of the server.
There are limited warning signs that can confirm if a website’s abnormal behavior is linked to DDoS. The warning signs can also be issues you might already have with your computer, like a virus or a slow internet connection.
Malicious hacking groups can send threats about a potential DDoS directed at your website, but there are no warnings. Often, website owners won’t recognize a DDoS attack until their customers raise an issue.
A substantial amount of time goes into realizing a DDoS attack and mitigating it, resulting in heavy website downtime and income losses.
Common signs of a DDoS attack are:
Distributed denial-of-service attacks can be tricky for administrators to deal with. Given the support of some automation, alerts, and proactive notification, you can minimize the time taken to identify a DDoS assault.
Before you experience one of the above signs, there are certain actions you can take to protect yourself from a DDoS attack.
The earlier a DDoS attack is identified, the better, so you can further protect yourself by acting fast to these alerts. When under an attack, notify your internet service provider right away to see if they can reroute the malicious traffic.
Your firewalls and routers should also be configured to reject harmful traffic being sent to your server and your application's front-end hardware.
Lastly, as a consumer, to keep your devices from being turned into a botnet, ensure that you’re only using trusted software updated with the latest security patches. If you frequently use IoT devices, ensure they’re formatted using maximum protection. And of course, when it comes to login information, use a strong password that no robot or hacker can crack.
DDoS attacks can put your network or server in serious jeopardy. If not handled properly, it can last for several days, resulting in legitimate traffic and revenue loss. There are various techniques that enterprises use to protect themselves against DDoS attacks.
Limiting the attack surface area sets protective mechanisms in places more prone to DDoS. Ensure that your applications, ports, protocols, or other resources aren’t exposed to places where you don’t expect any incoming traffic.
You can also put your resources behind content distribution networks (CDN) or load balancers. Critical infrastructure such as database servers should be prevented from receiving direct internet traffic. It’s advisable to equip a firewall or access control list (ACL) to regulate and control incoming traffic on your applications.
Make sure your hosting provider offers ample redundant internet connectivity while architecting applications. This helps manage a high volume of traffic during a volumetric DDoS attack.
A vast majority of DDoS attacks take up a lot of resources. If you can quickly scale up or down on
your computation resource, you’ll be able to mitigate such attacks. Equip larger computation resources or leverage their features, such as extensive network interfaces or enhanced networking capabilities that support higher resource utilization.
When you observe high traffic volumes, accept only the maximum volume that your host can handle without affecting availability. Professionals recognize this concept as rate limiting.
Although rate limiting is a valuable technique in a DDoS mitigation strategy, it would be tricky to handle a complex attack unaided by other mitigation measures.
Advanced protection techniques analyze the packets to identify if the traffic is legitimate or malicious. You should be able to distinguish between good and bad traffic to separate them.
Understand the characteristics of good traffic and make it a baseline. Then, you can compare each packet against this baseline to filter legitimate traffic.
A web application firewall (WAF) stages a strong defense against SQL injection or cross-site request forgery, preventing malicious hackers from exploiting any known vulnerability. Administrators use WAF to control traffic and customize mitigation measures to protect against illegitimate traffic disguised as good traffic coming from unexpected geographies or bad IPs.
Creating a blackhole route with no specific restrictions protects against e a DDoS attack. Both legitimate and attack traffic goes through this route into a blackhole where it gets dropped from the network. Internet service providers (ISP) can send traffic to a blackhole while experiencing a DDoS.
In most situations, this might not be ideal as it fulfills attackers’ motive of making a network inaccessible to legitimate users.
Anycast network scatters incoming website traffic into distributed servers that can absorb a DDoS attack’s impact. The reliability of this mitigation strategy depends on the size of an attack and the network’s efficiency.
This approach spreads out the impact of a DDoS attack in such a way that it becomes manageable so it doesn’t disrupt the availability of a system or server.
DDoS protection tools secure websites and applications against these types of attacks by monitoring web traffic and establishing a baseline for normal traffic loads. Companies use DDoS protection tools to proactively maintain steady site functionality and prevent sudden site delivery failures caused by the rapid influx of traffic.
Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks flood a target system or service with traffic originating from a single source.
On the other hand, attackers carry out DDoS by driving attack traffic from multiple systems directed at a victim’s system or service.
The primary difference between DoS and DDoS is that the former is a system-on-system attack. The latter observes an attack from multiple systems on one target system or service.
Typically, hackers use a script or a tool to conduct a DoS attack, whereas DDoS attacks involve coordinating with multiple compromised hosts with malware. They create a botnet managed by a centralized command and control (C&C) server.
|
Denial-of-service |
Distributed denial-of-service |
|
Single system targets the victim |
Multiple systems attack the victim |
|
Loads victim's computer with packets sent from a single location |
Loads victim’s system with packets sent from multiple locations |
|
Attacks are slow |
Attacks are faster |
|
Easy to block |
Difficult to block |
|
Can be traced easily |
Can pose difficulties in tracing |
|
Traffic volume is low |
Traffic volume is high |
| Examples: Buffer overflow attacks, Ping of Death or Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) flood, or Teardrop Attack |
Examples: Volumetric, Fragmentation, and Application layer attacks. |
Distributed denial-of-service protection software helps websites prevent attacks and keeps them secure. This software monitors website traffic and establishes baselines according to normal traffic loads.
Whenever web filters notice abnormal traffic spikes, they redirect the traffic flow to a controlled source, lessening any disruptions caused due to rapid traffic influx.
To qualify for inclusion in the DDoS Protection software list, a product must:
* Below are the five leading DDoS protection software from G2's Spring 2022 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
Webroot DNS Protection works at the DNS layer to block malware infiltration and prevent malicious traffic inflow. It controls networks and maintains security, privacy, and visibility to protect IT infrastructure and users, even those working remotely.
“Webroot DNS Protection is easy to deploy and maintain, a lot of thought has gone into streamlining the user experience. Once deployed, protection is straightforward. An administrator has a lot of flexibility over what and how users are blocked and who can assign different levels of users differing abilities. Webroot's massive database of harmful IP addresses is updated continually, and DNS Protection draws on that huge foundation of knowledge to pair with machine learning/AI to sculpt security settings in real-time.”
- Webroot DNS Protection Review, David Y.
“The primary complaint that I have is that I have to fight the DNS configuration when attempting to set a static IP address on my machine. A technician mode or something that can be used to temporarily override the DNS settings would be a fantastic addition.”
- Webroot DNS Protection Review, Koby D.
FortiDDoS protects enterprise data centers against DDoS attacks. It leverages an extensive cluster of known DDoS methodologies and mitigates attacks using a multi-layered approach. It also analyzes the behavior of data to detect new attacks, allowing it to stop zero-day threats.
“I like FortiDDoS for being software with a set of high potential features that allow companies of any size to stay protected daily. It’s easy to implement, manage, and includes dynamic protection capable of multiples that makes our company not affected by inactivity in the face of attacks but instead copes with them.
It’s a powerful software that keeps evolving to offer its users the best solutions to deal with possible attacks, thus protecting against zero-day and known attacks. In addition, it’s quite fluid and has low latency. The best thing is that it’s constantly analyzing threats to help prevent false positives. In the event of any inconvenience, it provides efficient and attentive support, which makes it a complete and ideal software for business protection.”
- FortiDDoS Review, Emma J.
“Although FortiDDoS provides excellent performance, as it brings advanced, powerful and fast protection characteristics, using it can be somewhat complex. This is reflected above all when the user does not have technical knowledge in this type of software.”
- FortiDDoS Review, Zaid T.
DefensePro offers automated DDoS protection from fast-moving, high-volume, encrypted, or very-short-duration threats. It leverages a dynamic quantile DoS algorithm and allows service providers with large-scale networks to detect and mitigate hidden phantom flood attacks and traffic anomalies.
“The main benefit is the advanced prevention of DDoS attacks and mitigating attacks by botnet networks that seek to disable and render services unavailable. This tool does what it promises. We have suffered attacks this past year and the tool has protected and prevented the site from going down.”
- DefensePro Review, Carlos S.
“Slowness in the network faced during implementing some policies.”
- DefensePro Review, Harsh P.
DataDome’s real-time, full-visibility, 360° client-side and server-side bot detection protects against security threats at all endpoints, including defense against Layer 7 DDoS attacks and carding frauds.
“DataDome provides me with an intuitive dashboard that obtains traffic information of our web applications protected by its extensive modules. It gives an overview of all monitored current threats, associated requests, and risk levels of the application. Their comparison protocols on threat requests and average threat traffic automatically segregate risk levels. It offers Cloud DDoS protection which prevents all DDoS attacks even before they reach our targeted network.”
- DataDome Review, Ravi C.
“Not much to dislike; we are pretty satisfied with the platform. We want to run API requests to Datadome from our SIEM systems such as Splunk to augment the IP data but cannot do it ‘out-of-box’ yet.”
- DataDome Review, Siddharth H.
Imperva DDoS Protection secures all assets at the edge for uninterrupted operation. It blocks attack traffic at the edge – without having to scale up in bandwidth to pay for it. The software ensures business continuity, with guaranteed uptime and no performance impact.
“My company has been using Imperva DDOS protections along with WAF and Advanced Bot protections. So far, we've had zero issues with DDoS attacks, which translates as DDoS protections are working, as we know that we are a constant target as a financial organization.”
- Imperva DDoS Protection Review, Robert H.
“The audit logging to SIEM has been challenging to configure, and they are not secure. Sometimes data is entirely visible, which can lead to data leakage. It should improve the audit logging feature.”
- Imperva DDoS Protection Review, Consultant in Government Administration
Implement DDoS mitigation strategies and defense mechanisms to maintain your website’s availability and ensure you’re up for business. Adopt DDoS protection software to enforce a layered approach to manage and mitigate DDoS without paying extra for scaling up bandwidth.
Learn more about network monitoring software and measure the overall performance of your network against expected performance baselines.
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