DoS attacks can be used to settle personal scores or to disrupt online competitions. Attacks against players are often DoS assaults, executed with widely available malicious software. Conversely, attacks against gaming servers are likely to be DDoS assaults, launched by stressers and booters. Read our article to learn more about DDoSing in online gaming.
These threat actors are known by multiple names, including DDoSser, booters, and stressers. The wide availability of DDoS for hire makes it possible for almost anyone to wage large-scale attacks.
One reason actors may go by a particular name is to appear as a legal service. For example, stressers typically claim to offer services for stress testing server resilience. Example of booter advertised prices and capacities. Cybercriminals are going to attack. Some are going to hit their targets, regardless of the defenses in place. However, there are a few preventive measures you can take on your own:. Solutions can be deployed on-premises, but are more commonly provided as a service by third-party providers.
We explain more about DDoS mitigation services in the following section. This first step in selecting a DDoS mitigation solution is to assess your risk. Important basic questions include:. A large law firm, on the other hand, may be more interested in protecting its infrastructure—including email servers, FTP servers, and back office platforms—than its website.
The second step is to choose the method of deployment. The most common and effective way to deploy on-demand DDoS protection for your core infrastructure services across an entire subnet is via border gateway protocol BGP routing. However, this will only work on demand, requiring you to manually activate the security solution in case of an attack. The advantage of this solution is that most CDNs offer on-call scalability to absorb volumetric attacks, at the same time minimizing latency and accelerating content delivery.
Mitigating Network Layer Attacks. Dealing with network layer attacks required requires additional scalability—beyond what your own network can offer. Consequently, in the event of an assault, a BGP announcement is made to ensure that all incoming traffic is routed through a set of scrubbing centers.
Each of these has the capacity to process hundreds of Gbps worth of traffic. Powerful servers located in the scrubbing centers will then filter out malicious packets, only forwarding the clean traffic to the origin server through a GRE tunnel. This method of mitigation provides protection against direct-to-IP attacks and is usually compatible with all types of infrastructures and communication protocols e.
Protecting against an NTP amplification attack: Gbps and 50 million packets per second. Mitigating Application Layer Attacks. Mitigation of application layer attacks relies on traffic profiling solutions that can scale on demand, while also being able to distinguish between malicious bots and legitimate website visitors.
For traffic profiling, best practices call for signature-based and behavior-based heuristics, combined with IP reputation scoring and a progressive use of security challenges e. Together, these accurately filter out malicious bot traffic, protecting against application layer attacks without any impact to your legitimate visitors. Terms to Know: Command and control server.
DNS amplification. DNS reflection. App Tiers Affected:. Table of Contents. Volumetric attacks , also known as floods, are the most common type of DDoS attack. This has aided attackers in launching massive DDoS attacks, which can range from hundreds of gigabits per second to terabits per second—well beyond the capacity that most organization can handle on their own networks.
Protocol attacks. The goal is to exhaust the computational capabilities of the network or intermediate resources such as firewalls , resulting in denial of service. Because protocol attacks deal at the packet level, they are typically measured in packets per second. Application layer attacks also known as OSI layer 7 attacks target web servers, web application platforms, and specific web-based applications rather than the network itself.
Application layer attacks are measured in requests per second. This volumetric attack prevents a server from handling new connection requests by manipulating the standard way TCP connects a client to a server.
Normally, in what is known as a three-way handshake, a client connects to a website by sending a SYN synchronize packet, the server replies with a SYN-ACK synchronize-acknowledge packet, and then waits for an ACK acknowledge packet from the client.
UDP flood. The server, trying and failing to find applications associated with the requested ports, is soon overwhelmed, at which point it can no longer respond to any requests, including legitimate ones. One advantage of this attack is that UDP makes it easy for attackers to hide their identity by spoofing the source IP address.
HTTP is the protocol that enables clients to communicate with web servers on the Internet. The server tries to respond to all requests but eventually, its resources are exhausted. DNS flood. DNS reflected amplification attack. Attackers often combine reflection with amplification techniques, for example, by requesting far more information than just the IP address for a given domain name.
This significantly increases the size of the responses—sometimes up to 50 times—which obviously increases the impact of the attack. If the attacker uses a botnet, the size of the attack can be even further magnified. Heavy URL. While the HTTP requests themselves are relatively small, the responses, which can involve loading multiple large files or running complex database queries, can take a long time for the server to process.
Eventually the site resources are exhausted, leading to a denial of service. Low and slow for example, Slowloris. The goal of these DDoS attacks is to bring application resources down quietly and stealthily—and do it using very little bandwidth. There are several types of low and slow attack tools, all of which attempt to monopolize server resources indefinitely.
One tool called Slowloris works by opening hundreds of connection requests and keeping each one open as long as possible by slowly sending data to the server before each connection times out. To use another telephone analogy, these attacks are a bit like a mischievous person calling a company to request information, but the caller talks so slowly and can't adequately explain what they want that the operator must put the call on hold.
Financial loss. Sites that are highly dependent on the Internet for revenue, for example, heavily-trafficked ecommerce, gaming, or web hosting sites, can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every minute their sites are down. Remediation and compensatory costs. All organizations, revenue-dependent or not, will have some amount of remediation costs. Some organizations, for example, web hosting providers whose outage affects thousands of its own customers, might have significant compensatory costs to pay.
Loss of customers and customer confidence. In a world where any conceivable product is available to purchase with just a few mouse clicks, loss of online customers can be fatal. Buyers are fickle, and nothing will drive online customers away faster than an unreachable or unresponsive site. Reputation and goodwill.
No business wants to make headlines for its security failures. Customers are especially less forgiving with businesses like banks and credit bureaus for whom trust is an important factor. It can take time for some businesses to repair their reputation and brand after a DDoS attack, especially if the attack is used as a diversion for a data breach in which personal or customer data is stolen or compromised.
Threat of legal action. Organizations that have been the victim of DoS attacks would rarely be challenged with legal action from consumers, but they might from customers with whom they have service level agreements SLAs. Imagine a large company that depends on a software-as-a-service app to deliver employee payroll twice a month. If that app goes down during a pay period and paychecks are delayed, the provider could be subject to legal action. Implement DDoS protection.
If your network capacity can handle moderate attacks in the range of 10 to 50 Gbps , is routinely targeted, and you have skilled in-house DDoS mitigation personnel, implement an on-premises DDoS solution.
Outsourced solution. Hybrid DDoS. If your organization is at risk for frequent or large-scale DDoS attacks that would exceed your network capacity, and you want DDoS mitigation expertise beyond the skills of your in-house staff, take the hybrid route and use a managed service in combination with an on-premises DDoS solution.
Have a DDoS response plan. Have a detailed playbook that outlines every step for incident response people, processes, roles, procedures, etc.
Protect your network infrastructure by using firewalls and intrusion detection systems to monitor and analyze network traffic; use anti-virus solutions to curb malware infections; use load balancing and redundancy to help maintain availability. A typical DoS attack usually stems from one computer causing havoc to another network of computers. By using multiple computers, the perpetrators make it difficult to combat and find the source of the attack, causing widespread disruption to the system or website.
The motives behind a DDoS attack can be spurred on by political reasons, revenge, business interests, criminality or even activism — leading many to point the finger at governments, terrorist groups, disgruntled employees and sometimes, thrill-seeking lone hackers. The main targets of DDoS attacks are usually financial institutions like banks and credit card companies but there have been other high-profile victims of these types of attacks including Microsoft, MI5 and the BBC.
Sometimes by targeting one company, multiple networks or websites can be brought to a standstill as was the case of Dyn — who manage web traffic for the likes of Twitter, Netflix and Reddit — who have billions of users. Imagine a thousand people all trying to call the same phone number at the same time. On top of that, trying to find out which number caused it to begin with could prove next to impossible.
A DDoS attack works in a similar way. It usually takes the form of simultaneous requests from multiple rogue computers or virtual servers trying to view or access a computer system or website. DDoS attacks are usually only likely to affect business owners — particularly people in charge of large computer networks. However, they can also affect small businesses, blogs or personal websites.
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