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By: Ernest Sampera on December 16, 2020
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have long been a thorn in the sides of companies of all sizes and industries—though they are particularly dangerous for organizations that rely heavily on digital services (either to conduct business or to deliver their own services to customers).
What are DDoS attacks? How can they impact a business? What are some DDoS mitigation strategies you can use to blunt or stop different DDoS attack types?
Quick Links:
A DDoS attack is a type of cyberattack wherein the attacker tries to deny access to a specific service or network (hence the “denial of service” part of the name) by overwhelming the target system or the infrastructure it runs on—typically with basic access requests.
In many cases, these attacks leverage the use of numerous malware-compromised systems as part of the attack (hence the “distributed” part of the name). However, not all DDos attacks rely on simple brute force numbers to overload a target. There are several different types of DDoS attacks, which can make DDoS mitigation and remediation difficult.
Some DDoS attack type examples include:
There are a number of reasons why a person or group might choose to launch a DDoS attack. Two primary motivations, as noted by Penta Security, include “hacktivism” and “politics.” DDoS attacks, particularly against larger corporations or businesses with popular services, tend to garner a lot of attention very quickly—which can make a DDoS attack ideal for raising awareness about a specific issue.
Another motive noted in the Penta Security article was the use of DDoS attacks “as a distraction for a larger attack… where the attack may be used indirectly for a larger security breach.” Basically, while a victim is busy with trying to stop a DDoS attack, the attacker is leveraging the confusion caused to breach security for other systems and get away before the breach is noticed.
So, what’s the potential fallout from a DDoS attack? Why should businesses work to stop a DDoS attack before it begins?
Failing to stop a DDoS attack means losing access to critical IT resources for the company and its customers. The forced downtime from such an attack can be incredibly costly for a business. A popularly-cited statistic from an old Gartner article states that network downtime costs “$5,600 p/minute, which extrapolates to well over $300k p/hour.”
While the actual cost of network downtime may vary for different organizations based on their size, industry, and business model, there is little doubt that the impacts of extended network downtime can be severe for companies of any size.
The fallout from a DDoS isn’t limited to the direct costs a company incurs from lost sales opportunities and the labor spent getting their network back online. There are other costs to consider, such as:
These indirect costs of a DDoS attack can have far-reaching implications that make it harder for a business to remain profitable and competitive.
One of the difficulties in stopping a DDoS attack is that there are several different types to deal with that target different potential weaknesses in the network. Additionally, it’s necessary to avoid throwing out the good traffic from legitimate users with the bad.
So, there are a number of different DDoS mitigation strategies that companies need to employ simultaneously to prevent their network from being overwhelmed—especially if attackers are using a multi-vector strategy.
While the above tools can all be helpful in DDoS mitigation, they aren’t enough on their own. To get the best results, it’s important to have an incident response plan and IT experts in place to carry it out. This plan should include measures to help employees identify the signs of a DDoS attack (network slowness, inability to access resources, etc.), alert the incident response team, and assign roles and responsibilities for each step of the process so everyone knows what to do.
Having an incident response plan (and the people to run it) in place can have a major impact on an organization’s DDoS mitigation, and thus any network downtime they face. Creating such plans is just a good network security practice in the first place!
With volumetric attacks becoming bigger than ever—the current record for largest attack at the time of this writing is a massive 2.3 Tbps (Terabits per second)—it’s never been more important to have a strong DDoS protection strategy.
One such tool is vX\defend from vXchnge. vX\defend is one of the risk mitigation tools that comes with vXchnge’s colocation data center services. The basic strategy is that vXchnge uses multiple internet service providers (ISPs) to provide networks with increased resiliency and to reduce lag. If one ISP’s services are compromised (such as being used for a DDoS attack), vX\defend will utilize multiple routing paths to redirect your network traffic before the attack reaches your data center—keeping your services online and available to both your employees and customers.
In addition to rerouting bad traffic, vXchnge also offers “burstable bandwidth” of up to 1 Gbps (Gigabit per second) of additional bandwidth to help cover unexpected traffic spikes so your network performance doesn’t suffer.
Are you ready to transform your IT capabilities and mitigate future DDoS attacks with ease? Reach out to vXchnge today to get started!
Use this checklist to help protect your investment, mitigate potential risk and minimize downtime during your data center migration.