Prevent DDoS Attacks: Essential Tips and Best Practices

DDoS threats are not only becoming more dangerous, but DDoS attacks are also increasing in number. In a DDoS attack, a hacker overwhelms a network or server with fake traffic. This excessive traffic overloads the resources and disrupts the connection, preventing the system from handling real user requests. 

What is a DDoS attack, and are there different DDoS types? How can businesses protect against or defend DDoS by using best security practices? Let's get started!

What is a DDoS Attack?

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is an attempt that aims to crash a network or service and disrupt the targeted server traffic by flooding the system with fake internet traffic. In DDoS attacks, hackers send too many connection requests, messages, or packets to the targeted server and cause the system to shut down or crash. 

The objective of a DDoS attack is to infect IoT devices with malware. Attackers use botnets capable of launching attacks from remote locations. By generating disruptive requests to the network's IP address, the bots within a botnet overwhelm the network, potentially leading to a denial of service.

Here are the different reasons why hackers might pull off DDoS attacks:

• Disrupt Services: Hackers use DDoS attacks to disrupt regular business operations, online communications, or services by overwhelming their systems.
• Brand Damage: They can harm a company's reputation using DDoS attacks by causing downtime in the server, making people criticize the company's reliability.
• Gain A Business Advantage: Some hackers target competitors with DDoS attacks, hoping to get an upper hand while their competition's services are down.
• Distract or Divert Attention: During a DDoS attack, hackers might exploit the chaos to divert the company's attention and sneakily engage in other activities.

DDoS Attacks Types

There are three different categories of DDoS attacks:

• Application-layer attacks
• Volume-based or Volumetric DDoS attacks
• Protocol attacks

Application-Layer Attacks

An application-layer attack focuses on disrupting a specific application rather than an entire network. Hackers flood the target server with a high volume of HTTP requests, overwhelming its capacity to respond. To quantify the impact of these attacks, cybersecurity experts measure them in terms of requests per second (RPS), commonly targeting web apps, internet-connected apps, and cloud services.

To mitigate a DDoS attack in the application layer is complex because distinguishing between legitimate and malicious requests is difficult. They use fewer resources compared to other DDoS methods; some hackers can even execute an application-layer attack with a single device. This attack is also known as a “layer 7 attack” in cybersecurity.

Protocol Attacks

Protocol DDoS attacks, also known as network-layer attacks, exploit internet communication protocol weaknesses to slow down the entire network. 

There are two main types of protocol-based DDoS attacks: first, SYN floods, disrupting the TCP/IP connection process by flooding the target with SYN packets, prompting synchronization requests instead of acknowledging connections. This effectively crashes the system as it awaits a connection that never comes, and the second is Smurf DDoS, whichcreates a crashing loop using false IP addresses. 

The protocol-based attacks are measured in packets per second (PPS) or bits per second (BPS). They're prevalent due to their ability to bypass poorly configured firewalls.

Volumetric Attacks

This type is the most common DDoS attack type where a machine or network's bandwidth is trapped with spam data requests across all available ports. This type overwhelms the network or service, making it incapable of handling its usual traffic load. Volumetric attacks also have subcategories. The UDP (User Datagram Protocol) flood is the most prevalent subtype, frequently employed to dispatch manipulated UDP packets with fabricated addresses, such as the victim's IP address, to servers for UDP-based applications. 

Why Should You Prevent DDoS Attacks?

There are multiple reasons why you need to prevent DDoS attacks, including the following:

• Implement essential measures for the prevention of denial of service attacks. In this way, you can prevent your network from overloading or unusability during critical periods.
• Establishing a robust strategy to prevent ddosing attacks, including the use of server DDoS guard, is time-intensive but offers enhanced peace of mind and benefits in terms of network security.
• Incorporate mitigation techniques and early warning detection to support your organization’s cybersecurity posture effectively.

Top 7 Most Effective DDoS Prevention Methods

DDoS attack mitigation is a big problem, but by using proper security measures and planning, you can prevent ddosing. Let’s see how you can reduce the potential impact and risk of a DDoS attack.

Prepare a Countering DDoS Response Plan

You should be aware of the potential outcomes if a DDoS attack occurs, and your organization should have a mitigation strategy or counter-DDoS response plan to protect from DDoS. Crafting a proactive strategy in advance enables swift and practical responses when your network becomes a target.

Developing such a plan requires careful consideration, with the complexity of your infrastructure determining the depth of your DDoS response blueprint. Irrespective of your company's size, your plan should encompass the following elements:

• Step-by-step instructions, escalation protocols, and notifications.
• A detailed checklist for system tools.
• Proficient response team that has deep knowledge about their responsibilities.
• A list of internal and external contacts to apprise them of the attack.
• Communication strategy encompassing all stakeholders, including customers and vendors.

Improve DDoS Protection for Server and Networks

It is essential to take some network security measures for stopping a DDoS attack endeavors. The effectiveness of an attack largely depends on the hacker having enough time to send group requests. Detecting a DDoS attack in its early stages becomes beneficial to controlling its impact.

Organization users should actively follow best security practices, encompassing actions like regular password updates, using secure authentication methods, and recognizingphishing threats. 

In short, adopting suitable precautionary measures minimizes user errors within your organization that directly correlate to an elevated safety level, even in the face of an attack.

Create a Dedicated Server with DDoS Protection

When your organization uses different dedicated servers, it is a big challenge to attack all servers at a time. So, in this case, hackers need to launch DDoS attack requests for multiple servers. But, if an attacker successfully executes the DDoS attack on a single hosting server, the remaining servers will still be unaffected and perform their regular business operations.

To prevent network congestion or vulnerable single points, host servers in various regions across data centers and colocation facilities. Additionally, utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is beneficial because a CDN effectively distributes the load across multiple servers. In this way, your server will be able to defend against DDoS attacks.

Know the DDoS Attack Causes or Symptoms

Sudden network slowdowns and abrupt website service disorder can be indicative of a DDoS attack. Getting sudden unknown spam message requests is another symptom of DDoS attack risk. However, these are not the only indicators of such attacks. 

Slow system performance, a surge of requests from a particular endpoint or page, system crashes, disabled connectivity, and the presence of unusual traffic stemming from a single IP address are all additional common signs of DDoS. Recognizing these signs is crucial as they may point to a DDoS attack targeting your network, necessitating immediate attention and countermeasures.

Monitor Suspicious Network Traffic 

It is good security practice to monitor your network traffic in real-time continuously as you are familiar with your organization’s traffic patterns. 

Once you detect unusual network activity and signs of a DDoS attack, you can instantly block the requests. Real-time monitoring enables your organization to promptly detect the onset of a DDoS attack, allowing you to take swift measures to prevent DDoS attacks and their impact.

Leverage Cloud Resources to Prevent DDoS Attacks

In countering DDoS attacks, on-prem hardware and software play an important role; however, moving to cloud-based infrastructure offers distinct advantages due to its scalability and capacity to handle significant volumetric attacks. 

Businesses have two main options for implementing cloud-based DDoS protection: First, on-demand cloud DDoS mitigation that activates post-detection of a threat by the in-house team or provider. Second, an always-on cloud DDoS protection that channels all traffic through a cloud scrubbing center (with minor latency). This option suits mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate downtime.

The option to outsource DDoS prevention to a cloud provider comes with several merits. Cloud providers furnish comprehensive cybersecurity, integrating robust firewalls and vigilant threat monitoring software. The public cloud boasts superior bandwidth compared to private networks. Data centers ensure heightened network redundancy through data, system, and equipment replication.

Reduce Network Broadcasting

In DDoS, hackers send too many unusual requests to attack a device on your network. But, your cybersecurity team, who has enough capabilities, can counter DDoS attacks by reducing or limiting the network broadcasting between devices.

Conclusion

In this article, we explained how businesses can prevent DDoS attacks and stay ahead of hackers. The security practices that we have mentioned above will help you mitigate DDoS attacks and let businesses recover quickly after an attack. However, make sure to implement them timely before it’s too late!