In the midst of running daily operations, raising funding, marketing, testing prototypes/ products, and so on, startups tend to ignore security. It comes from a combination of the ‘we are too small to be attacked’ mindset and the lack of time and resources to implement security controls.

Unfortunately, every business is a potential target, especially for DDoS attacks that are much easier to orchestrate. Given the astronomical financial ruin, legal costs, and reputational damage, startups can’t afford to be DDoS-ed. So, how to protect against DDoS attacks? Keep reading to find out.

As a Startup, How Should You Protect Against DDoS Attacks?

1. Onboard an Advanced, Reliable, and Effective DDoS Protection Service

Given the frugal resources, startups may not be able to hire dedicated security professionals or expand their IT teams. Hiring reliable, intelligent, and fully managed DDoS mitigation services is one of the most effective and hassle-free ways to protect startups against DDoS. The best services work as extensions to the startup team and extend their well-rounded and proven expertise to protect applications and ensure they are always available.

The best denial of service protection helps address all kinds of DDoS challenges, be it – protocol-based, multi-vector, application-layer, and volumetric attacks, regardless of the complexity or sophistication of attacks. They deploy world-class WAF technology and advanced techniques to help startups achieve zero time to mitigation and build DDoS resiliency.

The best solution leverage intelligent automation to continuously monitor traffic, requests, and user behavior and isolate and block malicious behavior while allowing only legitimate users to access the application. They have scalable infrastructure so that security can scale with a startup’s growing needs. They custom-build WAF policies to thwart complex attacks and prevent business-specific DDoS challenges. They monitor and manage false positives and help prevent alert fatigue.

2. Prepare for the Load, Build Redundancies

DDoS attacks overwhelm targeted servers with large volumes of requests to drain their resources. Startups should always be ready to tackle such loads. They must build redundancies into their architecture, making it highly scalable and resilient.

Shifting to the cloud helps strengthen bandwidth scalability while using load balancers, smart DNS resolution, network interfaces, etc., strengthening server and transit capabilities. But the most effective way to build scale and resiliency against Layer 3 and 4 attacks is by using a CDN service combined with DDoS protection.

CDN or content delivery networks use caching technology and a global network of edge servers to serve the requested content to users. The origin server is not pinged every time a user makes a request. CDN has built-in redundancies and can handle any large traffic spikes or thunderous herd surges.

When placed at the network edge, the requests for non-cached content are routed through the DDoS solution. So, malicious requests can be easily filtered out. Not just that, CDNs help accelerate website speed and performance.

3. Continuously Monitor Your Traffic

Every how to protect against DDoS best practices article and guide will stress the criticality of continuously and granularly monitoring traffic. A baseline for normal traffic must be built and constantly adjusted. With intelligent DDoS solutions like AppTrana, this recalibration happens automatically as self-learning AI is deployed for this purpose. These self-learning systems use threat intelligence, attack history, logs, analytics, and so on to do so.

Using this baseline, the traffic is closely monitored for anomalous behavior, malicious requests, and unusual activity through 24×7 monitoring and individual packet analysis. Intelligent solutions decide on a case-to-case basis whether to allow, block, flag, or challenge a user based on deep pattern and behavioral analysis.

4. Consciously Reduce Your Attack Surface

A wide attack surface with several unprotected endpoints invites attackers to wreak havoc on the IT infrastructure. Startups must consciously reduce their attack surface with the help of a next-gen WAF, minimizing the risks of DDoS and other lethal threats.

5. Keep Tuning and Tailoring Your WAF Policies

Generic, off-the-shelf rulesets for WAFs are not as effective in preventing DDoS as custom-built WAF policies. Rulesets need to be built with surgical accuracy based on contextual awareness, real-time intelligence, and startup-specific security challenges. The best anti-DDoS solutions keep tailoring and tuning WAF policies to ensure maximum protection.

6. A Detailed and Well-Defined Incident Response and Recovery Plan

Despite best efforts, DDoS attacks may occur at times. How to defend against the DDoS attack and minimize losses? By fearing the worst and building robust incident response and recovery plans which must be continuously updated.

The plan must have clear guidelines on how to react and whom to inform, ways to keep operations going despite the attack, a tools checklist, well-defined escalation protocols, etc. This must be communicated to all startup team members to know what to do.

The Way Forward

Now that you know how to protect against DDoS start strengthening your DDoS and overall security defenses to keep your mission-critical assets, data, and infrastructure secure and ensure they are always available.

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