What is a DDoS attack, and how does it work? With technology rising, these attacks are common threats to organizations. This is not new, but their frequency and sophistication are concerning. DDoS attacks cause significant global financial, reputational, and operational damage to organizations globally. According to Cisco, the number of DDoS attacks doubled from 7.9 million in 2018 to 15.4 million in 2023 globally per annum. This data indicates an alarming 807% increase in DDoS attacks. To manage DDoS attacks, it is crucial to make a defense strategy that enhances the organization’s resilience.
In this article, we discuss what is a DDoS attack. how it works, how to detect and respond to DDoS attacks, their types, and processes for mitigating a DDoS attack.
Let’s dive in!
What Is A DDoS Attack?
DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service, but what is a DDoS attack in practical terms? These are malicious attempts to disrupt a targeted server’s average traffic, network, and service by overwhelming the target or its infrastructure with an internet traffic flood. DDoS attacks achieve effectiveness by using many computer systems as an attack traffic source.
DDoS attacks are illegal and aim to disable or take down a site, web application, cloud service, or other online resource by overwhelming it with pointless requests for connection, fake packets, and malicious traffic. The malicious traffic comes from IP addresses, often botnet members. These attacks are brutal for defending against, and attackers enable and generate more malicious traffic volume than a single system can generate. It is launched from numerous compromised devices and is often distributed worldwide as a botnet.
It potentially impacts organization value, including financial setbacks, operational disruption, damage to reputation, and increased system security risks. The most significant DDoS attack on record generated 3.47 terabytes of malicious traffic per second and targeted Microsoft Azure customers reported in November 2021. Attackers used a botnet of 10,000 devices worldwide to hit victims with 340 million packets per second.
In a DoS vs DDoS attack, DoS affects smaller systems, and DDoS affects larger systems. The main distinction between DoS VS DDoS attack methods lies in the number of attacking devices. DDoS vs DoS attacks aid in faster response. Cloud VPS protection helps to maintain service availability in case of cyberattacks. With cloud VPS protection, virtual private servers stay online even in high traffic.
DDoS attacks are widespread and target all industries and companies globally. Some industries, like e-commerce, telecommunications, and gaming, are targeted more than others. DDoS attacks are common cyber threats that compromise business, sales, online security, and reputation.
Typical targets for DDoS attacks include:
- Online casinos.
- Internet shopping websites.
- Any organization and business that depends on providing online services.
DDoS attacks for a lot of reasons. Some are:
- Hacktivism: Attackers direct DDoS attacks against websites and companies having philosophical and ideological disagreements.
- Cyber Warfare: The government uses cyber threats like DDoS to impair the critical infrastructure of the enemy states.
- Extortion: Attackers often utilize DDoS threats to extort money from companies.
- Entertainment: Many attacks are launched by hackers that simply seek to entertain by wreaking havoc by experimenting with cybercrime.
- Business Competition: Businesses launch a DDoS attack on another company and gain a competitive advantage.
How Does A DDoS Attack Work?
DDoS attacks in their work process use HTTP and TCP. It has three stages.
Stage 1: Selecting The Target:
DDoS array targets come from attacker motivation, which can spread widely. Hackers use DDoS attacks to extort money from organizations, demanding a ransom to end the attack. Some hackers use DDoS attack tactics in cyber warfare.
Some of the common DDoS tactics in cyber warfare include:
A. Online Retailers:
DDoS attacks cause financial harm to retailers or make it impossible for customers to shop for a while.
B. Financial Institution:
DDoS attacks on banking systems offline cause customers to lose access to their accounts. In 2012, central banks were affected by the DDoS attack, which involved some politically motivated acts.
C. Software As A Service Provider:
With cloud service providers, SaaS is an attractive target because they love hackers to do this to multiple organizations at a time. GitHub suffered at the time in 2018 from a severe attack.
D. Gaming Companies:
The online gaming world is also affected by DDoS attacks and traffic flooding, launched by disgruntled players with personal vendettas. With the Mirai Botnet, which was built to target Microsoft servers. Gaming companies had a 94% increase in layer 7 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks over the recent year.
Stage 2: Creating a Botnet:
DDoS attack requires a botnet, which is a network of connected devices with malware that facilitates the remote control of the device. Botnet includes laptop and desktop computers, mobile phones, and IOT devices. Their owners are unaware they have been infected or used for DDoS attacks. Some cyber criminals create botnets from scratch, and some purchase or rent them under a model referred to as denial of service as a service.
Not all DDoS attacks use some exploit of regular operation of uninfected devices for malicious ends. In Feb 2020, Amazon web services faced a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack that lasted three days. These disrupt significant platforms like Twitter, Github, and others across Europe and North America.
Stage 3: Launching The Attack:
Hackers command the device in the botnet to send a request for a connection to the IP address of the target server or device. Some DDoS attacks focus on brute by sending many requests to eat up all target bandwidth. Some DDoS attacks send a minimum number of connection requests.
Hackers obscure the source of attack by IP spoofing, a technique of fake IP addresses. In reflection of IP spoofing, hackers look for malicious traffic sent from the victim’s IP address.
How To Detect And Respond To A DDoS Attack
Detecting a DDoS attack is highly essential for minimizing impact. It can be challenging to differentiate it from regular network surges, web traffic, or DDoS attacks. It is getting complicated to detect these attacks, mainly since sophisticated methods like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are being used. GANs can imitate genuine user requests.
Users can monitor DDoS attack red flags by:
- If a site performance is low and suddenly reported by an internal user.
- Server responses with a 503 unavailable error because of service outages.
- Unexplained spikes in traffic are visible in the Google Analytics report.
- Querying the same data beyond TTL by repetitive traffic source addresses.
- Some specific IP addresses might be receiving a large number of requests.
Today, many software solutions help in determining potential threats. Network monitoring services and security alert systems have changed so that users can understand how to play quickly.
Regular traffic monitoring is essential for early attack detection; too many alerts can cause alert fatigue and cause IT teams to look for critical signs in numerous harmless events. Some traditional detection methods and recent advancements help users to identify a DDoS attack valueably.
Users also want a DDoS attack action plan with defined rules and procedures so a team can take the best action against these threats. It is important to remember that not all DDoS attacks are the same; users need different response protocols to mitigate various attacks.
What Are Some Common Types Of DDoS Attacks?
Different attacks have different strategies and are classified on the network connection layer they target. A connection on the internet consists of 7 layers defined by the OSI model created by the International Organization for Standardization. The model allows different computers to talk to each other. Let’s discuss the type of DDoS attacks in detail:
1. Application Layer Attacks:
This DDoS attack type exhausts target resources and is difficult to identify as malicious. It sometimes refers to a layer 7 DDoS attack– layer 7 attacks of the OSI model and application layer attack, which targets the layer to which pages are related in an HTTP request.
The server runs a database query or generates web pages. In attack form, the victims’ server can handle more than usual. It is similar to refreshing a web browser on different computers simultaneously. The large number of HTTP requests overwhelms the server, which causes DDoS.
2. HTTP Flood:
This type of DDoS attack is like many HTTP requests flooding the server, which causes denial of service. This implementation varies from simple to complex. The more straightforward implementation accesses one URL with the same range of IP addresses attacking referrers and user agents. The complex version also uses many IP addresses attacking and targeting random URLs using random referrers and user agents.
3. Protocol Attacks:
Protocol attacks absorb all capacity of web servers or other resources. Layer 3 and layer 4 of OSI protocol stack 2 are weak. SYN flood is a case of a protocol attack in which an attacker sends a target an overwhelming number of TCP and shakes requests with spoofed addresses. The targeted server attempts to respond to each connection at first, but the final handset never occurs, resulting in the target being overwhelmed.
4. SYN Flood:
It is a DDoS attack in which the attacker overwhelms the target system by sending many synchronized requests to the target server. The target exploits the three-way handshake process of TCP communication. It operates at OSI model layer 4, explicitly affecting TCP. A SYN DDoS attack seeks to overwhelm many devices, load balances, servers, and session management. Mirai Botnet, famous for massive DDoS attacks, used SYN flood techniques to hack 600,000 IOT devices, including targets like Krebsonsecurity Lonestar cell and DYn.
Hackers execute SYN flood attacks in 3 ways:
- Direct SYN flood attack.
- SYN spoofed attack.
- DDoS SYN attack.
Detect SYN flood attacks by these critical factors:
- Elevated inbound network traffic.
- Overloaded SYN queues.
- Degraded network performance.
- Non-responsive servers.
Take these steps to protect against SYN flood attacks:
- Increasing backlog.
- Reduce SYN received timer.
- SYN cache.
- Load balancers.
- Firewall & Proxies.
- Honeypots & Honeynets.
- SYN cookies.
- Rate limiting.
- Hybrid approaches.
- Cloud-Based DDoS protection solution.
- Filtering.
5. Volumetric Attacks:
This DDoS attack type controls bandwidth between the victim and the wider internet. DNS is an example of a volume-based attack in which attackers support a target address and send a DNS name that looks like a request to open a DNS server with the spoofed IP address.
When the DNS sends a request, the record response it provides in place of the target results in the target receiving an amplified version of the attacker’s initially small query.
Types of volumetric attacks include:
- ICMP Flood.
- DNS reflection floods.
- UDP Floods.
- TCP out-of-state floods.
- Reflection amplification attacks.
The volumetric attack can be mitigated by flow telemetry analysis, web application firewall, and privacy security models.
6. DNS Amplification:
DNS amplification is a joint 2-step attack in which attackers manipulate open DNS servers. Cybercriminals use a spoofed IP address to send massive requests to the DNS server. One of the known examples of DNS amplification is the Spamhaus attack in 2013, which hit 300 Gbps, making it one of the most significant DDoS DNS attacks at that time.
The impact of DNS amplification involves:
- Service disruption.
- Reputation damage.
- Collateral damage.
- Increased cost.
Windows firewall DDoS protection blocks excessive incoming requests. By enabling Windows firewall DDoS protection, users can prevent traffic surges.
What Is The Process For Mitigating A DDoS Attack?
Mitigating a DDoS attack involves identifying and filtering malicious traffic by tools like firewalls and traffic scrubbing systems while maintaining legitimate user access. Additionally, implementing blackhole routing, rate limiting, and web application firewalls for risk assessment and traffic differentiation is essential.
1. Blackhole Routing:
In DDoS, mitigating black hole routing is a practical step in which network traffic is routed in a black hole or lost. When black hole filtering is implemented without restriction criteria, legitimate and malicious network traffic is routed to a null road, and a black hole is dropped from the network. No notification of data drop return to the source. TCP requires a handshake to connect with the target system notification that is returned if data is dropped.
2. Rate Limiting:
The second step to mitigate DDoS attacks is to request rate limitations in a specific time frame. Attackers make many repeated calls on APIs and make resources unavailable to genuine users. When the limit crosses, block API access temporarily and return the 429 HTTP error code. Rate limiting is insufficient to fight attacks but serves as a component of a multipronged approach.
3. Web Application Firewall:
Deploying a web application firewall (WAF) is essential to protect against application-layer DDoS attacks. Positioned as a frontline DDoS defense. The web application firewall (WAF) mitigation step protects apps by filtering, mitigating, and blocking malicious HTTP/s traffic to the web and preventing unauthorized data from leaving the app.
A web application firewall establishes policies that determine what traffic is malicious and safe. Anti-DDoS VPS provides reliable online services and withstand traffic spikes.
4. Anycast Network Diffusion:
Another step in mitigating a DDoS attack is Anycast Network Diffusion. Anycast is a network that addresses and routes methods for incoming requests routed on many locations or nodes.
Anycast network diffusion routes incoming traffic to the nearest center with the capacity to process requests efficiently.
5. Risk Assessment:
Environment scan to search for network weak spots that uncover infrastructure areas susceptible to DDoS attacks. Another DDoS attack mitigation step is risk assessment, which takes a proactive, strategic approach for NimbusDDoS to review an organization’s infrastructure and identify weak areas.
This switches from reactive to proactive, allowing one to address risk on terms rather than being dedicated and driven by attackers.
6. Traffic Differentiation:
If organizations are affected by DDoS attacks, they must determine the quality and source of their traffic. Organizations cannot shut off all traffic at once, but they would be trying out the good with the bad.
The best mitigation strategy is to use an anycast network to distribute the tagged traffic across a network of a distributed server. Traffic differentiation mitigation will be done so that the traffic is adjusted by the network and becomes manageable.
7. Firewalls:
To reduce the impact of attacks at the application layer (Layer 7), organizations use a Web Application Firewall (WAF) between the internet and their servers, which acts as a reverse proxy. Firewalls set rules to filter requests, starting with a predefined set and adapting them based on suspicious activity, such as that caused by DDoS attacks.
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Conclusion
DDoS attacks are prevalent and could cost businesses from thousands to even millions. They are ongoing security threats. It is essential to understand what is a DDoS attack. It is crucial to stay informed and continuously take security measures or leverage how to prevent DDoS techniques to ensure the infrastructure’s resilience.
With the best planning, solid resources, and trusted software, minimize DDoS attack risk. DDoS attacks and malware harm organizations online and negatively affect their functionality, customer trust, and sales. Detect, secure, and defend the organization with expert resources and integrated threats, how to prevent DDoS products, and how to protect businesses, online operations, and sensitive data. If you have any questions, ask in the comment section below!
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