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Best DDoS Protection Services

Posted DateNovember 29, 2019
Posted Time 5   min Read

With the growth of botnets, it’s compulsory to have a well-structured DDoS protection service today.

distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack uses several compromised systems or other network resources to overwhelm an online service, making it unavailable.

Such attacks create massive business risks. And they are increasing in volume and frequency. Digital Attack Map provides daily visualization for such attacks globally.

Can You Protect Against DDoS?

Given the complexity of distributed denial of service attacks, there is hardly a DDoS prevention solution without proper techniques to identify abnormalities in traffic and offer a prompt response. Backed by a battle-plan and top-notch technology, one can minimize the threat.

Early threat detection is one of the DDoS prevention services you can consider. DDoS attacks can come in various forms. An increase in the number of spam emails in the inbox or a sudden slowdown in network performance is a common sign of a DDoS intrusion. These alarms should be addressed as soon as you noticed for DDoS protection. Organizations also require to understand the competency of their equipment to detect the DDoS attack.

If you feel your in-house resources are not enough to address the attacks, you can work with security vendors to get advanced DDoS prevention services.

With proper methodology to detect and mitigate all types of attacks, you can set a successful defense in your business.

What Is the Best DDoS Protection?

Irrespective of the business size or location, DDoS security is mandatory today. DDoS protection solutions are more than just service guarantees. When searching around for security vendors, you should be wise to find which kind of DDoS Protection service your business requires. The resilience and quality of the underlying service are a vital factor in your defense. You should carefully evaluate their DDoS protection solutions to understand how well it can safeguard you against DDoS attacks.

Here are the 7 best factors to look for in a DDoS prevention service and a bonus most effective application DDOS protection tip $8 that will aid you get started.

  1. Recognize Attack Types

Your ability to identify the attack type before attackers is an integral part of the DDoS protection program. There are three frequent types of attacks that your business may encounter.

  1. Layer 7, Application Layer or HTTP Flooding

This kind of application-layer attack targets an application with requests from multiple sources. Such attacks generate high volumes of the POST, GET, or HTTP requests causing service downtime ranging from hours to weeks. Layer 7 is widely used to bring down e-commerce, banking, and startup websites due to the low cost and ease of operation.

  1. UDP Amplification

An attacker chokes the target server or network with open NTP or DNS with request traffic. This traffic on Layer 3 or 4 (Network or Transport) is intensified with the payload traffic and is massive in comparison to the size of the request, hence overwhelming the service.

  1. DNS Flooding

Making a DNS resolution unavailable can also disrupt an application, network, or server.

  1. Create a DDoS Attack Threat Model

To keep up with increasing growth and customer demands, most new-age businesses struggle with web resources inventory. New customer portals, payment gateways, application systems, marketing domains, and other resources are created and retired frequently. Are your web resources organized?

Create a database of all the web assets that you’d like to be protected from DDoS attacks, as an inventory sheet. It should contain network details, protocols in use, domains, number of applications, their use, last updated version, and so forth.

  1. Set DDoS Priority Buckets

Are all the web resources equal? What are the resources you want to be protected first?

Begin with specifying priorities and criticality of your web resources. For example, business and data-centric web assets should be under the critical bucket with 24/7 protection against all kinds of DDoS attacks.

  • Critical:Put all the assets that can compromise business transactions or your reputation. Hackers will have a higher motivation to target these resources first.
  • High:This bucket should include web assets that can hamper day-to-day business operations.
  • Normal:Everything else should be included here.

A new priority bucket can be created for domains, networks, applications, and other services that are no longer in use. Move them out of the business operation network as soon as possible.

  1. Test and Patch Vulnerabilities

Irrespective of the DDoS attack layer, testing and fixing vulnerabilities should be a priority across the business. While volumetric attacks can hurt an establishment, vulnerabilities present hackers with other means to exploit.

  • Test all the web resources for vulnerabilities daily, or as frequently as possible.
  • Deploy patches and updates on priority. The lag between availability and deployment in applications, systems, and networks often leads to attacks.
  • Stay updated on zero-day vulnerabilitiesand their patches.
  1. Get DDoS Protection Tools

Today, the market is flooded with tools that help you detect and defend critical web resources from DDoS attacks. It is important to understand that these tools fall under any of the distinct categories- Detection and Mitigation.

  • Detection:Irrespective of the layer of attack, mitigation depends on your ability to detect fake traffic surges before they cause any serious damage. The majority of the DDoS protection tools rely on signatures and source details to warn you. They rely on traffic hitting critical mass, which affects service availability. However, detection alone is not enough and needs manual intervention to look at the data and to apply protection rules.
  • Automated Mitigation:Can DDoS protection be automated? Many anti-DDoS solutions direct or block fake traffic based on preconfigured rules and policies. While automatic filtering of bad traffic on the application or network layer is desirable, attackers have found newer ways of beating these policies, especially on the application layer.

The occurrence and the potency of these attacks on the application layer have forced business owners to look beyond network options. The above-mentioned tools would fail to provide thorough protection against layer 7 attacks.

  1. Deploy Web Application Firewall

It’s difficult to stop an application layer 7 DDoS attack. Traffic from such attacks mimic normal user behavior and requires application layer expertise for detection and mitigation. Layer 7 attacks are more likely to cause financial and reputational damage in comparison to layer 3 or 4 DDoS attacks.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) or Layer 7 Firewall is the best defense against volumetric attacks. It thwarts malicious traffic trying to block vulnerabilities in the application. However, WAF such as AppTrana backs DDoS protection solutions with round-the-clock monitoring from security experts to identify fake traffic surges and to block them without affecting legitimate traffic.

  1. Monitor Incoming Traffic

Traffic logs provide regular updates on exchanges taking place on your application or network. There are gigabytes of data flowing across multiple locations and observing it all at a single location provides an excellent view of anomalies.

Continuous monitoring of traffic flow and analysis will help your organization learn from historic attack data and attack patterns.

Moreover, centralized monitoring becomes even more critical in the application layer. Based on Anomalies, botnet signatures, and suspicious behavior your cybersecurity team can flag traffic surges.

BONUS TIP: Deploy WAF with a Custom Workflow DDoS/Bot Rule

Central to most businesses today is applications. The major worry prompting businesses to take preventive steps against a DDoS attack is to protect their applications from going down. Also, DDoS attacks targeted at the application layer are increasing as the attacker’s goal for causing damage can be achieved with lesser computing resources and lesser time in a more targeted fashion by gearing the attack payloads at an application layer.

A WAF will inspect traffic at an application layer, raise alerts, and block if there are volumes of malicious application payloads being sent to the application. Besides raising alerts, every block event can be a trigger to also take incrementally stronger defense posture and insights of other payloads coming from the same IP session and take more aggressive actions without worrying about False positives.

What makes application DDoS detection most challenging is payloads can be crafted such that each individual request looks perfectly legitimate but are bombarding the application and its CPU cycle by sending many of perfectly legitimate request. (example fill up a form and post it and force the backend application to spend CPU cycles on many such concurrent requests). To counter this, custom policies that can distinguish normal human transactions from an automated one can go a long way in countering application-level DDoS attacks.

Stay tuned for more relevant and interesting security updates. Follow Indusface on FacebookTwitter, and LinkedIn

DDoS Protection

Venkatesh Sundar

Venky is an Application Security technologist who built the new age Web application Scanner and Cloud WAF - AppTrana at Indusface as a Founding CTO. Currently, he spends his time on driving Product Roadmap, Customer Success, Growth, and technology adoption for US businesses.

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