How is a DDoS attack mitigated?

Many systems and sites are exposed to many types of attacks, each of which can cause irreparable damage to company owners.

You can get acquainted with some of them by reading the articles on our website, but in this article, we will deal with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

It is simply a malicious attempt to make an online service (In Slovak: online službu ) inaccessible to users of that website, usually by temporarily suspending the benefits of its host server.

It can cause a lot of damage to different organizations and interrupt various services to users.

Different users and institutions do their best to learn the available ways to reduce the possibility of being hacked by this type of attack, considering the many dangers that it can pose to their systems which will be covered in the following.

But, before we get to the main point, we need to discuss this threat more due to its destructive effect.

DDoS attack categories:

1. Application-layer Flood:

One type of DDoS attack is an Application-layer Flood, in which the hacker sends a large number of requests from a fake IP address to victims and eventually causes the service to slow down or break down completely.

For example, a hacker may send several requests per second or even millions of them, interfering with the system.

2. Volume Based Attacks:

In volume Based Attacks, the hacker sends a large amount of traffic to the victim’s site every second; the critical point is that in this type of threat, attackers do not have to impose a large amount of traffic from a single location or one source.

3. Protocol Attacks:

Protocol attacks are used to destroy the processing capacity of network infrastructure resources, from network infrastructure resources to servers, firewalls, and load balancers.

Common DDoS-attacks types

-SYN Flood:

In SYN Flood, the hacker exploits a known weakness in the TCP connection sequence, and the hacker pretends to be a client, sending the TCP SYN connection request at a higher rate than the victim machine processing power.

It has different types, among which we can mention Direct Attack, Spoofed Attack, and so on.

One way to counter this attack is to overwrite the oldest semi-open connection when the backlog is full.

-UDP Flood:

UDP Flood is ubiquitous among various attackers, in which the hacker launches a UDP flood attack by sending a large number of UDP packets to random ports on a remote host.

Among the ways to deal with a UDP flood attack, we can mention restricting the sending of ICMP messages as much as possible and disabling this service on the server if necessary.

-Ping of Death:

Ping of death (“POD”) attack is also widespread among hackers, which involves sending malicious pings to victims’ computers to disrupt their systems.

In this case, the attacker seeks to maliciously manipulate the piece’s contents, the receiver with an IP packet larger than 65,535 bytes if reassembled.

-HTTP Flood:

An HTTP flood DDoS attack is one of the threats that will be very difficult for you to detect if a hacker uses it.

The requests used in this case can be the same as a valid request sent by a real user, ultimately making it more difficult for you to detect.

To counter it, you can use the WAF service or web application firewall, which can investigate the behavior of the senders of various messages.

If there is any suspicious case, you can take the necessary measures.

-NTP Amplification:

The perpetrator exploits publicly available network time protocol (NTP) servers in NTP boost attacks to affect a target server with UDP traffic.

-ICMP (Ping) Flood:

For ICMP (Ping) Flood attacks, the hacker sends many messages to the intended user and eventually replenishes bandwidth so that the victim can no longer respond to messages received from real users.

-Slowloris:

Another is Slowloris, which enables the webserver to destroy another server without affecting other services or ports on the target network.

It sends too many HTTP headers that repeatedly fail to complete the request, denying additional connections to legitimate clients.

Impact of this Attacks:

As we have mentioned before, they have terrible effects on their victims’ systems, some of which will be discussed here.

-The victim loses time, money, and customers:

According to the reports, it can last for days and, in some cases, for many weeks; during this time, customers who visit the site cannot get what they want, which makes them get help from other resources to meet your needs.

-Employees cannot access network resources:

Another problem that arises as a result of this threat is that the employees of the attacked sites cannot access the network resources during this attack which is also very important.

-Infection of the system with various viruses:

When a system is attacked, it opens the way for various viruses such as Trojans to infiltrate and enter the system, eventually making it very difficult to re-establish system security.

Given all this, we need to learn different ways to reduce them, some of which will be mentioned below.

Ways to reduce these attacks

-Early detection of them:

As you know, you should detect the infection as soon as possible to deal with all kinds of attacks carried out by hackers, which requires a high level of awareness, or you need to get help from experts.

If you want to detect them, you can check the traffic volume, and if you recognize a high traffic volume that seems irrational, you should realize that you have been attacked, then you should take the necessary measures.

You can also compare common traffic patterns to your site and detect the threat in the shortest possible time.

-DDoS protection network response:

Another thing that can reduce their effects is the response of the DDoS security network, which quickly removes the traffic of malicious robots and absorbs the rest of the traffic, so it can significantly help the owners of various sites.

Another measure that a protection network can take is to boost cache or NTP, which can significantly impact lower-level attacks.

-Residual traffic management:

Another measure taken to reduce them is routing, in which intelligent traffic routing divides the remaining traffic into manageable sections and prevents further damage.

-Adapt to attack patterns in security services:

It is also essential, as by adapting to attack patterns, a security service can resist future attacks.

What purpose do hackers use these attacks to achieve?

-To strategically eliminate competing websites:

Owners of various businesses may seek help from hackers to carry out these attacks on their competitors' sites and prevent them from conducting important business events.

-Take ransom from the victim:

One of the main goals of hackers in carrying out such attacks is to gain a lot of financial resources which they can get from the victims.

-Cyber ​​Warfare:

In addition, these targets may be used to destroy the infrastructure of the enemy country and ultimately cause irreparable damage.

Last word:

In general, hackers may use various attacks to achieve their goals, one of which is the DDoS attack, which has different types, some of which have been described in this article.

The main topic that we addressed is the ways to reduce them, such as early detection of them, DDoS protection network response, adapting to attack patterns in security services, but it should be noted that there are other ways you can get help from to avoid being threatened except the cases that have been discussed in this article.

These attacks are increasing day by day; the main reason is that the hackers can achieve their primary goal through them, so it is necessary to raise your awareness as much as possible in this field.

We hope this article can be helpful for you and you can detect this type of threat as soon as possible with full awareness by following the tips mentioned above.