Does Your DDoS Protection Solution Defend Against the Latest Attacks?

DDoS attacks are becoming more prolific, powerful, vicious, and highly expensive. And traditional DDoS protection solutions that depend on traditional WAFs, network firewalls, signature analysis, and rate-limiting are simply failing to protect against these latest versions of DDoS attacks.

Today, advanced, multi-layered cloud DDoS protection services that use futuristic technologies such as AI, ML, automation, predictive analytics, and so on are necessary for effective, ongoing, and holistic protection against the latest attacks.

Why is it so? What features and capabilities should the DDoS protection solution provide? Read on to know the answers.

Latest DDoS Attack Trends: An Overview 

Some Facts and Figures 

• H1 2021 saw over 5.4 million DDoS attacks, an 11% increase from H1 2020.
• The figure of 4.83 million attacks DDoS attacks in Q4 2021 soared by 52% from Q3 2021 and soared by 465% since Q4 2020
• The healthcare industry, manufacturing industry, gaming/ gambling, government, government agencies, etc., were highly targeted sectors in DDoS.
• DDoS attacks have grown in size – a growth in attack potency of 2851% since 2017 has been observed for the strongest attacks. So, even large networks can be brought to a standstill in a short period.
• DDoS attacks now cost companies USD 20,000-40,000 per hour!
• SYN Floods and UDP Floods were the most prevalent DDoS attack vectors in 2021.

The Rise of Blended DDoS Attacks 

While the idea behind DDoS attacks is to disrupt services and prevent legitimate users from accessing the targeted website/ network/ application, it is often also used as a smokescreen for other malicious activities. In the recent past, especially since the onset of the global pandemic, this trend of blended attacks saw a sharp rise. Ransom-motivated DDoS attacks increased by 29% in 2021 as opposed to 2020.

More Diverse Multi-Vector Attacks

A few years back, attackers would use a single attack vector to orchestrate DDoS attacks. However, the number of complex attacks using four or more vectors has increased, amplifying the complexity of DDoS attacks. Several attacks in the last year used 27-31 vectors in a single attack. The challenge in protecting against such denial-of-service attacks is that even when one of the vectors is shut down or disrupted, the others will keep sending requests to the server to overwhelm it. So, multi-vector attacks become harder to disrupt without the right DDoS protection solution.

Newer and Nastier Attacks Arise 

Several newer, nastier attacks have emerged in the past few years. Attacks are not just volumetric; there is strong growth in sneaky application-layer attacks, network attacks, and slow-and-low attacks. Attacks could last just a few minutes, but the impact on the organization can be long-lasting, financially and reputationally. The highly targeted carpet-bombing attacks against ISPs, cloud service providers, hosting providers, carriers, VPN services, etc., have grown too. Attackers also use several evasion techniques to avoid detection by anti-DDoS solutions. Advanced, managed DDoS protection solutions are necessary to effectively detect and stop these attacks.

Surfacing of New Botnets 

While botnets continued to play a central role in orchestrating DDoS attacks, new and lethal botnets such as Meris have emerged. With a botnet size of 250,000 compromised devices, Meris was used to orchestrate massive application-layer attacks in H2 2021. One of the attacks was against a US-based financial institution wherein a high of 17.2 million requests per second (RPS) was reached. In another attack, Meris botnet achieved 21 million RPS against a Russian bank through its cloud-hosting service.

Without next-gen, intelligent, and cloud DDoS protection solutions, it is close to impossible to detect such botnet activities and stop them before they spiral into severe attacks.

Easy to Orchestrate Attacks 

Today, source codes, botnets, DDoS toolkits, etc., are readily available to attackers for hire. So, it is much easier and seamless to orchestrate DDoS attacks now.

DDoS Protection Solutions: Must-Have Features to Protect Against Latest Attacks

1. Zero Time to Mitigation 

The best DDoS protection and mitigation solutions swiftly swing into action since the attacks may last for a much shorter duration and can cause severe damage. To achieve this, these solutions use a combination of AI with self-learning capabilities, intelligent automation, predictive analytics, and other advanced technologies to find unusual and potentially-damaging activities faster than any traditional solution.

2. Multi-Layered Protection 

The DDoS protection solution must secure the application against volumetric, network, and application-layer attacks and provide comprehensive coverage against all kinds of DDoS attacks. It must be instantaneous and always-on.

3. Monitor and Filter-Out Bad Requests

The solution must monitor all incoming traffic and requests while allowing only legitimate users to access the application/ network/ systems. Instead of simply using signature-based detection, the solution must use advanced techniques such as behavioral analysis, granular traffic inspection, heuristic analysis, etc.

The Bottomline 

If your DDoS protection solution does not have the above-discussed capabilities, it will be ineffective against the latest breed of DDoS attacks. And your IT infrastructure will be left open to highly damaging attacks!

This guide is based on Indusface’s practical experience in proven DDoS mitigation solutions for different attack scenarios and our keen insights into cybercriminals strategies.

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