DDoS Attack - 4 Beneficial Tips to Prevent It

Being the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack can be disastrous: According to security firm Cloudflare, the average cost of an impactful DDoS attack to a company is around $300,000 for every hour the attack lasts.

Longer-term costs include reputational damage, brand deterioration, and the loss of customers, all of which lead to lost business. That is why, rather than focusing on how to stop a DDoS attack once it has begun, it is worthwhile to invest significant resources in preventing a DDoS attack or, at the very least, reducing the risk of becoming a victim of one.

This blog covers six beneficial tips to prevent a DDoS attack.

What is DDoS Attack?

A standard denial of service (DoS) attack commonly involves flooding an IP address with large amounts of traffic. If the IP address is pointing to a Web server, genuine traffic will be unable to reach out to it, and the website will be inaccessible. A flood attack is another type of DoS attack in which a group of servers is flooded with notifications that must be processed by the victim devices. These are frequently generated in large numbers by codes running on infected systems that are part of a botnet, and they result in the victim web server’s resources, such as CPU or memory, being exhausted.

A DDoS attack follows the same principles, except that the fraudulent traffic is generated from numerous sources and managed from a single point. Because the traffic sources are dispersed – often all over the world – preventing DDoS attacks is much more difficult than preventing DoS attacks sourced from a single IP address.

How Does DDoS Attack  Work?

DDoS attacks are carried out by a network of devices that work together under the authority of the perpetrators. These vulnerable devices form a botnet, which is capable of sending a flood of malicious users to the target resource.

Laptops, smart devices, PCs, servers, or Internet of Things (IoT) devices could be distributed over long distances. In a botnet, there could be thousands or even millions of such devices that are controlled remotely. The devices themselves could have been compromised by hackers exploiting security flaws and infecting them with malicious programs without the owners’ knowledge.

The 2016 Dyn attack, which brought down much of America’s internet connection and hobbled sites like Twitter, the Guardian, and Netflix, was one of the biggest and most high-profile DDoS attacks. This attack made use of Mirai malware and a botnet of IoT devices such as cameras, televisions, printers, and even baby motion detectors.

The procedure for launching a DDoS attack is as follows. After infecting the devices with malware, the cyber attacker takes control of them. Once such a botnet has been established, specific instructions for carrying out an attack are sent remotely to each bot. Each bot sends queries to the server’s IP address if the aim is a network or web server.

How to Identify a DDoS Attack?

Here are some of the signs to identify a DDoS attack:

Begin searching into unexpected site issues.

The most obvious sign of a DDoS attack is when a website or service completely unexpectedly slows down or goes down completely. However, this does not guarantee a DDoS attack because even legitimate requests can cause performance issues if there is a high volume of traffic.

Keep an eye out for unusual technical issues.

Certain availability issues may appear to be non-malicious at first glance, but they could be indicators of an impending DDoS attack. For example, during maintenance, certain technical issues with network security, such as extremely slow network performance, may arise. If you’re having trouble opening files, browsing websites, or if a specific website is down, it’s worth looking into to see if it’s the outcome of a DDoS attack.

Implement network security and traffic monitoring software.

The best way to identify and recognize a DoS attack is to monitor and analyze network traffic. A firewall, load balancers, or intrusion prevention system can be used to monitor network traffic. An administrator can even set up rules to generate an alert when an abnormal traffic load is detected, find the source of the DDoS traffic, and drop data packets that meet specific conditions.

Tips to Prevent DDoS Attacks?

Here are some tips that can help you in preventing DDoS attacks:

Buy more bandwidth

The most essential step you can take to build your VPS Hosting connectivity “DDoS resistant” is to make sure that you have sufficient bandwidth to manage traffic spikes that may be caused by malicious behavior.

Traditionally, you could avoid DDoS attacks by making sure that you had more bandwidth than any hackers were likely to have. However, with the rise of amplification threats, this is no longer a viable option. Rather, buying more bandwidth raises the bar that attackers must clear before launching a successful DDoS attack, but it is not a DDoS attack quick fix in and of itself.

Protect Your Network Hardware From DDoS Attacks

To help prevent a DDoS attack, you can make a few simple hardware configuration changes. Implementing your firewall or router, for example, to break incoming ICMP packets or to restrict DNS responses from somewhere outside your network (by obstructing UDP port 53) can help protect certain DNS and ping-based volumetric threats.

Secure Your DNS Servers

Remember that a malicious actor could take your application server offline by DDoSing your DNS servers. As a result, it is critical that your DNS servers have redundancy, and it is also a good idea to place them in multiple data centers behind load balancers. Moving to a cloud-based DNS provider that can offer high bandwidth and various points of existence in data centers around the world may be a better alternative.

Keep everything up to date.

All of these systems must be kept up to date in order to ensure that any errors and bugs are resolved. The best way of preventing a DDoS attack from bringing down important system infrastructures and impacting your end-users is to identify attacks as early as possible.