Understanding DDoS Mitigation, and the Solutions that Exist for DDoS Protection

DDoS attack & protectionBusinesses across the world are concerned about the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks seem to be inevitable, and reasons for the attacks seem to vary from cybercrime to hacktivism to pure bad luck. But the common denominator to all these attacks is the junk of traffic that is orchestrated by cybercriminals to bombard the victim.

Most common targets for these attacks are the servers hosted by the victims. Here the attack keeps the servers busy with the junk requests and blocks the legitimate users. The requests overwhelm the resources of the operating system or hosted application. The overloading prompts the target to offer completely low-profile services or even fail to provide any services at all.

The other forms of DDoS attacks consist of frequent volumetric attacks which overwhelm the network, saturate links or exhaust the infrastructure and security devices. In other words, DDoS are focused on flooding the network with junk traffic to the extent that no legitimate traffic can flow.

But are these tactics still affluent with manual DDoS techniques in place?

In this article, we’ll find out how DDoS attacks have changed with time and what we can do for DDoS protection.

How Have Things Changed with DDoS attacks?

DDoS attackIn comparison to the past, today, DDoS attacks are much more sophisticated.

Cybercriminals seldom overwhelm the network connections or saturate the links over which they propagate. As a result, it often skips the watch of human security analysts monitoring the network.

Attackers purposefully employ multiple attack vectors to evade traditional DDoS protection. These are short, sub-saturating attacks to crash critical services or sometimes masked as malicious cyberattacks. The DDoS attacks which do not saturate links are meant to impact the stateful infrastructure, servers and applications.

Also, short, sub-saturating attacks cause latency and poor network performance. This can lead to revenue loss and reputation damage to companies whose business is entirely dependent on the Internet.

Available DDoS Protection Solutions

DDoS protectionNo matter your company has experienced a sizeable volumetric attack in the past or facing disruption because of the ongoing issues caused by small, sub-saturating attacks, and your business is dependent on your Internet availability, we can employ different solutions available to defend against the DDoS attacks successfully.

When leveraging these DDoS protection solutions, first, your business needs to determine the kind of protection you need. There are three options to choose from:

  • On-premise solution
  • A hybrid combination of an on-premise appliance and a cloud-scrubbing center
  • Protection from hosting provider or Internet service provider
    Let’s expand on all of these options, so you can have a better understanding of what each of these offers:

    Purchasing an On-premise, Purpose-built Solutions

An on-premise, purpose-built DDoS defense solution is deployed between the Internet and the enterprise network. This can be called as a first line-of-defense and prevent outages by inspecting traffic at line-rate, obstructing attacks in real-time. As a result, it allows legitimate traffic to flow to the website.

On-premise, real-time defense ensures that your cybersecurity team gets complete visibility into DDoS security events. Also, the archived security data facilitates a comprehensive analysis of past threats required for compliance reporting.

Deploying A Hybrid Combination

With a hybrid combination of on-premise appliances and a cloud scrubbing center, you get protection against the whole range of attacks for organizations with modest Internet bandwidth.

In case your company experiences a massive volumetric attack, which saturates the links, you can engage with on-demand cloud defense provider to quickly initiate the service. On the other hand, the on-premise appliance mitigates the small non-saturating attacks and the residuals that are not blocked when the cloud-scrubbing is active.

The benefit of this approach is that the on-premise device massively reduces the number of times an organization switches over to the cloud. This lowers the costs and supports the real-time, comprehensive and consistent defense.

DDoS Protection as a Service (DDPaaS)

The DDPaaS services are increasingly being offered by Internet service providers. The solution simplifies the life for enterprise I.T. security teams because it works like outsourcing your DDoS protection. With the ISP, it guarantees that you get only clean traffic delivered to your network.

The Bottomline

While Cloud-based DDoS mitigation can be useful against massive, persistent, volumetric attacks, they are not able to deal with short, sub-saturating DDoS attacks. Our experts at GRIP I.T. recommend not to rely exclusively on cloud-based, on-demand mitigation, as they are not able to offer full protection against all types of DDoS attacks.

When shopping for DDoS attack protection, companies should consider the best value for a total cost of ownership, real-time protection that is granular, automated and scalable. At GRIP I.T., we have been providing state-of-the-art, highly effective, real-time automated DDoS protection solutions for enterprise, hosting and service provider customers across Canada. If you want to learn more about our DDoS protection plans, please contact us.