How to protect yourself from a DDoS attack. Symptoms and timeline.

What is a DDoS attack?

A distributed denial-of-service attack is when attackers attempt to disrupt services. They create insurmountable barriers to access to networks, services, servers, applications, and transactions within the system for a specific period of time.

Typically, these attacks are carried out by overwhelming the system with massive data requests.

The first option is that it can happen when the web server sends a lot of requests to serve the page and it becomes unavailable.

The second scenario is that a huge volume of database queries is sent. This overloads the internet bandwidth, central storage, and RAM resources, causing everything to crash and become unavailable.

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The impact can range from minor disruptions—minor service interruptions—to the complete inaccessibility of applications, websites, and related logistics departments of a business, or even an entire economic sector. Recent history has seen numerous examples.

Types of DDoS attacks

There are several main types of DDoS attacks:

a) Using large amounts of fake traffic to overload a resource—a website or server. This includes fake ICMP and UDP protocol packets and flood attacks. The volume-based size is measured in bps (bits per second).

b) Protocol and network DDoS attacks are when a gigantic number of packets are deliberately sent to network infrastructures. Control tools are also bombarded. Similar DDoS attacks include SYN floods and Smurf DDoS, but here the size is measured in packets per second (pps).

c) Regarding applications, the attack is based on them being overwhelmed with malicious requests. The size is measured in rps – requests per second.

The goal of any attack is to make online resources slow or completely inaccessible.

Symptoms

DDoS attacks can, at first glance, appear to be non-malicious events that can cause access disruptions. For example, a server crash. Or it could be a flood of user requests during sales or enticing promotions. Even something as trivial as a network cable breaking in a data center can occur.

In cases like these, you need to quickly analyze your traffic to figure out what's going on.

Today and tomorrow attacks

DDoS attacks are becoming a very common threat today, as they are used for blackmail, revenge, extortion, and cyberwarfare.

The colossal size of botnets facilitates the successful implementation of such unscrupulous activities.

A new DDoS technology has recently emerged. This is a variant of software designed to infect millions of IoT devices with a compiled virus. It then exploits servers with memory caching systems that can return significant chunks of data in response to normal requests.

Many companies' software is designed for use only on secure servers running on local networks, and it has few security measures to prevent IP address spoofing. Attackers exploit this and send data packets to unsuspecting victims. In such cases, it would be premature to say that the servers are occupied, as the server's job is to forward packets to the proper destination without asking any further questions.

In the near future, a key difference from the already familiar global DDoS attacks will be the use of IoT devices rather than computers and servers. This is alarming, considering that by 2025, there will be 40 billion IoT devices connected to the internet.

Attackers target those least able to adequately defend and recover.

Tools

And these, of course, are botnets—collective networks infected with malware that are centrally controlled and maintained. These infected endpoints are computers and servers, but increasingly, as we mentioned above, they are IoT and mobile devices.

Cybercriminals probe these systems, identifying vulnerabilities they can exploit through phishing attacks. They also aren't above renting botnets from their creators.

How DDoS attacks are evolving

The botnet trend will continue for the foreseeable future, that's a fact. Another trend will be the use of multi-directional vectors within a single attack, already known as Advanced Persistent Denial-of-Service. This application-level APDoS can target databases, applications, and servers. This is a new level.

There's a good saying: "A business is only as secure as its weakest link." Remember that.

Cyberattackers are refining their DDoS attacks, and defense technologies and tactics are also evolving. The addition of artificial intelligence to new IoT devices is already playing a visible positive role in mitigating these attacks.

How to protect yourself effectively?

One method of global protection is to block regions from which the site can be accessed. If you've identified the region from which you're being attacked,

The ideal solution for DDoS protection is to use reliable software and built-in packages of the functions needed for each task, integrated into firewalls.

Reliable hosting where traffic is directed to a processing centerNIC.UAand communication with your company's server occurs only in the background.

With this option, you transfer the vulnerability from your infrastructure to a larger distributed system with greater computing power and a mega-speed connection.

DDoS attacks can happen to anyone.

It is necessary to remember the threat and be ready to take timely measures.

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