The lockdown period was the period of DDoS attacks. During the pandemic, when many people were locked down, starting work-from-home jobs, and using online services, these attacks increased rapidly. Pandemic time showed them an easy way to attack. As per the recent report,10 million DDoS attacks were reported. DDoS attacks have affected many online services, remote work, healthcare, e-learning, e-commerce, and streaming services.
Several businesses are the victims of these DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks have a tendency to completely stop the business for a long time and its consequences can cause serious damage. Here are some examples of top companies.
In 2021, big giants such as Amazon and Meta suffered financial losses of around $34 million and $100M due to system outages. In this article, we have mentioned the best solutions to prevent DDoS attacks. Prevent the loss of your company and follow our best solutions to prevent DDoS attacks.
What Is a DDoS Attack?
DDoS(Distributed Denial of Services) attack is a form of cyber attack that overflows a website, server, service, or network with fake traffic. A sudden increase in traffic and failure of connectivity prevents the system from processing genuine requests of users. This becomes the reason for service unavailability, downtime, revenue loss, and unhappy customers. Let’s understand the difference between DoS(Denial of Service) and DDoS(Distributed Denial of Services).
Difference between DoS and DDoS
The goal of Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks is to target a specific application or website, destroy the system resources, and make it unreachable or inaccessible to users.
A DoS attack becomes a DDoS attack when the network or server filled with fake traffic originates from multiple IP addresses or machines.
How does a DDoS attack work?
Steps that explain how a DDoS attack works:
A DDoS hacker sends commands and requests to the botnet through a command and control server.
Botnets of hundreds of malware-infected devices send fake traffic( such as requests, messages, and fake packets) to the target IP address.
These fake traffics overflow the target server and disrupt the connection.
The server becomes unavailable to real users.
Reduce unusual DDoS attacks by following the best solutions to prevent DDoS attacks.
Classification of DDoS attacks
There are 3 types of DDoS attacks that hackers use to overwhelm a system.
1. Application DDoS attacks: Attack at the 6 and 7 layers commonly known as Application DDoS attack. These attacks are small in volume and target and infect a particular part of the network and make it unavailable to the users. Hackers produced large numbers of HTTP requests to overwhelm the server.
Web apps, Internet-connected apps, and Cloud services are the common targets of the Application DDoS attack.
2. Protocol DDoS attacks: Attack at 3 and 4 layers commonly known as Protocol DDoS attack. These attacks are common in nature and large in number. The goal of this attack is to disrupt the entire network by sending unwanted traffic.
3. Volumetric DDoS attacks: Attacks that consume the target’s available bandwidth and prevent legitimate users from accessing services.
These different types of DDoS attacks harm the entire system. To get rid of these issues, follow our best solution to prevent DDoS attacks.
What motivates DDoS Attacks?
Ideology, market competition, cyber destroyers, blackmail, cyberwar, and smokescreens are the motivations behind DDoS attacks. Take a look at these motives.
Ideology
Cyber terrorists use DDoS attacks when they disagree with the ideology of organisations – governments, politicians, companies, etc. These attacks cause harmful impacts on the daily operation activities of the organisations.
Market Competition
These attacks are driven by professional hackers with the motive of gaining market control. The goal behind these attacks is to cause severe harm to a competitor's business such as connection disruption, financial losses, and unhappy customers.
Cyber Destroyers
Cyber destroyers are groups of individuals that perform cybercrime and damage the website or system without any obvious ideology, or political motive.
Blackmail
Cybercriminals use DDoS attacks with the motive to force and blackmail someone through threads and acquire cash from their target.
Cyber War
Hackers use these attacks to implement cyber wars. Cyberwar is an attack on government administration using computer technology. These attacks target a country's critical infrastructure including financial, healthcare, transportation, and communication services.
Smokescreen
Thread actors utilise DDoS attacks to distract security teams and target security systems. This technique is designed to distract security personnel from the real threat.
These harmful motives can cause huge losses to any organisation and government. To avoid these, make a strategy using our best solution to prevent DDoS attacks.
How do I Know if I’m Under a DDoS Attack?
Here are some general signs that determine that you are under a DDoS attack.
Slow performance of the network and failure in opening files.
Websites unavailability.
large amounts of traffic from a single IP address or IP range.
Down performance of the application.
High consumption of memory and processor.
Unnatural traffic patterns such as spikes at odd hours of the day.
12 Best Solutions to prevent DDoS attacks
There is no proper solution that prevents your system and website from DDoS attacks but adopting proper planning and security measures may reduce the impact of DDoS attacks. Here are the best solutions to prevent DDoS attacks.
Understand your traffic pattern
Every organisation has different traffic patterns. A good understanding of traffic patterns helps you to be aware of unusual changes in traffic. Understanding traffic patterns is the best solution to prevent DDoS attacks.
Defining a Denial of Service Response Plan in advance
Preparing a response plan is considered the best solution to prevent DDoS attacks. Advance planning enables you to respond quickly when your system is targeted. System monitoring, quick response teams, notification alerts, and communication plans are the tools of advance planning.
Resilient your infrastructure
Infrastructure Resilience is one of the best solutions to prevent DDoS attacks. Ensure that your network is resilient against DDoS attacks. These DDoS attacks mostly target firewalls. To prevent this, use protection other than firewalls. Also, place your data processing centre on different networks in different physical locations.
Implement good cyber hygiene
Implementation of good cyber hygiene is considered the best solution to prevent DDoS attacks. Users must follow good cyber security practices that prevent unauthorised access. It includes changing passwords, user authentication processes, being aware of phishing attacks, and so on.
Magnify your bandwidth
DDoS Attack is responsible for a traffic jam in your network. To deal with such jams, magnify your bandwidth. This makes traffic jams less severe. It enables organisations to absorb more volume of traffic. By adding more bandwidth, your organisation will be able to absorb more to absorb a larger volume of traffic.
Utilise anti-DDoS hardware and software
Nowadays, DDoS attacks are very common. Many products are available in the market that are used to minimise certain protocol and application attacks. These products strengthen the infrastructure by adjusting settings and removing unused ports.
Activate cloud protection
Traditional firewall protection is not sufficient as it provides only network layer protection. To deal with DDoS attacks, activate cloud-based protection solutions.
Be alert for symptoms of a DDoS attack
Understand the unexpected changes in your websites. Website shutdown, poor connectivity, and crashes are some of the common symptoms.
Activate Multi-layered DDoS protection
Traditional methods such as firewall protection and enlarged bandwidth are unable to prevent different DDoS attacks. To protect the network from different types of DDoS attacks, multi-layer DDoS protection is used.
Avoid becoming a bot
Several tips help you to avoid becoming a bot.
Regularly update your software and device
Strengthen your password
Avoid suspicious emails and attachments
Utilise genuine anti-malware solution
Utilise genuine VPN
Black Hole Routing
This strategy is used to protect the target server and network by reducing heavy traffic.
Rate Limiting
Rate limiting is another best solution to prevent DDoS attacks and limits excessive traffic at a specific range.
Conclusion
Nowadays, DDoS attacks have become more challenging. As we know, DDoS attacks have caused huge losses to many internet users. In such a situation, it will be necessary to get rid of it. This article presents well-detailed information about the best solutions to prevent DDoS attacks. These best solutions to prevent DDoS attacks will help you build a resilient infrastructure that prevents your system and network from different types of DDoS attacks.
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