Defeating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is one of the biggest challenges today to network security because it is the number one cause of downtime, which can seriously affect an organization’s performance, cost, revenue, and reputation. While DDoS attacks may seem like commonplace when they occur, they have actually been responsible for crippling many websites, and the best way to avoid them is by taking the appropriate precautions. A good defense against these attacks requires more than simple monitoring or prevention of incoming traffic.
DDoS protection is a collection of strategies or systems for mitigating or resisting the negative impact of DDoS attacks on other networks attached to the Web by securing the source and relay networks involved in the attack. The majority of attacks begin with a request for information by a victim server. Usually, this information is related to a product or service offered by the website. As is usual, the request is received by the server in a timely fashion, but when there is not enough bandwidth or processing power, or when the connection to the source is interrupted, the data will be returned over the Internet as a flood of requests. This is the “ping” part of the attack.
Because these attacks are often so disruptive, it is very important for DDoS protection to be a high priority among a company’s current security plans. A company should consider how it plans to protect itself from attacks before it even happens. There are many factors that must be considered, including what type of network the attacker is attacking and how to defeat it. It is also important to consider the nature of the product or service that is being protected in order to determine what type of protection might work best.
The type of DDoS protection used depends on whether the victim site is part of an intranet or if it is part of a public network. An intranet requires more sophisticated protection than a normal public network because in an intranet the main point of access to the server is through the internal network. Therefore, all servers connected to the internal network must be protected against all other types of attacks, including DDoS attacks. In a public network, the server is usually available to anyone who logs onto the Internet and it is not possible to defend the server from all attacks.
The key to DDoS protection is the monitoring of the source or relay servers. It is also necessary to provide a variety of measures for protecting different types of internal or external networks in order to avoid a single point of failure (PoF). A large network that is divided into many networks is more difficult to defend than a single network, so it is important to have as much protection as possible across all the networks in the network.
One of the most common defenses used is the use of DNS filtering. This consists of making sure that any requests made from IP addresses that are outside of the intended address list are routed to internal servers.
Another common way to defend against DDoS attacks is to use an application firewall. Firewalls prevent hackers from accessing the server software that runs the website. Although most Internet users are not aware of this mechanism, firewalls are very effective in reducing the number of attacks since they prevent malicious software from gaining access to the system. The software usually provides a layer of protection between the software and the Internet in order to limit the number of possible attacks, and it acts as a gateway to ensure that only authorized software can access the server. Other DDoS protection methods include application intrusion detection (AID), which is used to detect and block malicious software or programs; packet sniffers and packet collars.
The purpose of packet collars or sniffers is to monitor and record any suspicious activity in the Internet network, thus helping you to identify possible DDoS attacks. When a packet is detected by one of these tools, it is opened and investigated by the system. Sometimes the packet is immediately blocked due to some security vulnerabilities or invalid header fields. If a packet cannot be prevented from being sent to its destination, the packet may be inspected to see what type of data is being transmitted. Some programs may allow for the modification of the header fields to modify or corrupt the packet before sending it
