As cybersecurity threats become sophisticated, many organizations fall victim to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks result in downtime leading to revenue loss, reputational damage, and unhappy customers.
The number of data breaches due to DDoS causes data loss. As per a recent report by Radware,” 2022 Global Threat Analysis Report”, in 2022, 1.46Tbps was the attack record, 2.8 times larger than the attack recorded in 2021, while the DDoS attacks grew by 150%.
Businesses must ensure adequate service availability by utilizing behavioral-based technologies. They must assess the attributes and challenges of numerous DDoS deployment options and station robust strategies to mitigate DDoS attack vectors.
Organizations must incorporate a DDoS mitigation solution that minimizes the risks. These mitigation solutions-
- Reduce business risk and downtime
- Protects website and application operations during and after the attack
- Actively defends against current and new threats
- Ensures protection against evolving attacks with the latest policies
Here is an essential checklist of what and why businesses must consider while deploying DDoS protection solutions for networks and applications.
Aspects to Look for in DDoS Solution
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Must Allow Hosting of the Applications in any Environment
Businesses must look for a unified solution that offers thorough protection for the applications across every environment, no matter where the applications are hosted- public, private, or on-premise cloud. They must also find a solution that offers core DDoS protection and web application firewall (WAF) capabilities. Moreover, it must also provide solid bot management since DDoS attacks are executed mainly via large-scale bot networks.
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Must Offer Overall Protection and Flexibility
The threats are evolving while enormous application-layer floods and SSL-DDoS attacks are the mainstream. Businesses must choose a solution that provides the most comprehensive protection and is not restricted to just network-layer attack protection.
Furthermore, businesses have organizational and technical requirements for the network and applications.
Selecting a service offering flexible diversion methods like API-based, manual, or automatic allows firms to choose what best meets their needs.
Also Read: Best Practices to Secure Critical Infrastructure
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Machine Learning, Automation, and Granular Service-Level Agreements
Prioritizing DDoS mitigation that obstructs attacks without impacting legitimate traffic is essential. These solutions utilize machine-learning and behavior-based algorithms to automatically evaluate appropriate behavior and block malicious attacks, maximizing protection accuracy and minimizing false positives.
Increasing dynamic and automated attacks have the necessities independency of manual protection. Automation collects data, detects attacks, determines traffic diversion, and mitigates attacks.
Furthermore, businesses must procure a contractual guarantee that indicates what the DDoS mitigation provider will deliver and their remedial in cases where they will not meet the promises. They must ensure a detailed structure of the mitigation, detection, alert, diverting time, consistency, and service availability.
Attributes of DDoS Mitigation Solutions
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Rate Limits and Granular Level Control
Rate limiting is a conventional DDoS attack mitigation method enabling businesses to restrict questionable IP traffic. It efficiently blocks the applications, users, or bots from wasting resources. At the same time, the solution should configure policies per the application’s behavior in addition to a static rate-limiting feature. Moreover, the solutions must trigger an alert during compromises in systems.
Furthermore, DDoS mitigation solutions enable businesses to integrate granular configurations with custom policies to avoid attacks. It allows users to construe policies per IP headers, source, destination IP, geography, and URI. Businesses must ideally auto-configure the policy nicks as per behavior-based traffic profiling.
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Offers Global Controls and Auto Scalability
IP blocklisting and allowlisting play a key role in internal server management requests and requests coming from legit users. These listings of IP addresses or countries are essential when-
- Users do not want some application parts to work in a specified country or make it accessible to the public.
- Users want to allow legitimate bots to access the application.
- Users have internal servers that abnormally make requests to the production server, however; users do not want them blocked by WAF or amend the behavioral DDoS rate limiting policy.
It is challenging for businesses to manage the black and whitelisting records in multiple files for each application with the given IPs. With the help of global controls, companies can view the status of blocked and allowed IPs in a single dashboard. Top mitigation solutions allow businesses to make bulk IP entries to black and allowlist across all the applications.
Also Read: Application Security Trends to Watch for
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Offers Auto Scalability and Content Delivery Network (CDN)
DDoS attacks establish large traffic volumes depleting resource capacity. More importantly, the preventive operations and mitigation process fails with the expansion of traffic and network size. A robust solution leverages a scalable infrastructure enabling businesses to resonate with the traffic that needs management.
These solutions actively mitigate large DDoS attacks by utilizing solid infrastructure to block large attack traffic. Auto-scaling enables businesses to assess DDoS attacks of up to 2.3 TBps over 10,000 concurrent IPs.
Furthermore, a DDoS protection service neutralizes the load off of the origin server by employing a CDN. Once the request is received, the CDN server responds with the cached version of the requested page. During a DDoS attack, the CDN absorbs and distributes the attack traffic by multiple server redirection. It helps businesses prevent the attack traffic from the origin server, secures and accelerates the website’s performance, and protects the origin server.
A well-managed DDoS protection offers a solid behavioral-based solution that utilizes a combination of detection and mitigation techniques for DDoS attacks and their monitoring and reporting. Flexible deployment strategies secure the network and websites. This integration of technology and human intelligence is one of the crucial features that a robust DDoS protection solution provides.
These solutions actively utilize advanced traffic analysis algorithms to monitor and track the DDoS attack traffic’s source. It empowers businesses to monitor the network and analyze data in real-time. More importantly, it provides solid protection against these attacks and readily adapts to evolving and new threats ensuring the network is protected.
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