What is DDOS
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack occurs when an attacker or group of attackers attempts to prevent a service from being provided. This can be done by restricting access to almost everything, including servers, computers, utilities, networks, applications, and even individual transactions within applications. A DoS attack is carried out by a single system, while a DDoS attack is carried out by several systems.
Types of DDoS Attacks
1. Volumetric Attacks
The most popular DDoS attack causes a machine’s network bandwidth to be overburdened by flooding it with false data requests on any open port it has.
2. Application-Layer Attacks
The OSI network design application application layer is the highest layer and the one nearest to the user’s interaction with the device. The application layer attacks are mainly focused on direct Web traffic. HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, and SMTP are all possibilities.
3. Protocol Attacks
A protocol attack targets link tables in network areas that deal with connection verification directly. The attacking machine will cause memory buffers in the target to overload and possibly crash the device by sending a series of slow pings, intentionally malformed pings, and partial packets. Firewalls may also be targeted by a protocol attack. This is why a firewall by itself would not be sufficient to prevent denial of service attacks.
How Does DDoS Protection Work 2021?
There are several options for defending your network and/or applications from DDoS attacks. The key issue here is determining how to distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic.
There are a variety of DDoS mitigation methods available today to address this issue, each with its own set of benefits and drawbacks. Clean pipe process, CDN dilution, and TCP/UDP-DDoS proxy are the three most popular DDoS security methods used today.
- Clean pipe DDoS protection
- TCP/UDP proxy DDoS protection
- CDN dilution DDoS protection
DDoS Protection Models 2021
On-premise DDoS protection model
The DDoS security system is installed on your company’s premises in this model (i.e., your data center). The advantage of this model is self-evident: you have complete control over everything, allowing you to update, modify, add, or delete any part of the DDoS security framework at any time.
Other benefits of this DDoS security model include:
- Quickness of response. This DDoS security model has a number of main
advantages.When a DDoS attack is detected, the in-house team will use the
on-premise device to react quickly. - Custom solutions can be created based on your DDoS security requirements,
and these solutions can scale independently of one another. - Much more capable of dealing with low-level DDoS attacks.
- You don’t have to give third-party DDoS service providers your private keys.
Cloud-based DDoS protection model
Many businesses have moved to cloud-based DDoS security solutions, which are usually less expensive because we don’t have to invest in infrastructure or equipment (at least, we can reduce the cost). We may also minimise the expense of maintaining these DDoS hardware solutions in terms of human resources.
- However, this does not imply that cloud-based DDoS security is always better or simpler, and we must remember the following factors:
- Customer feedback and the solution’s credibility. This is a critical move to consider in today’s world, and we must also consider the customer service aspect in addition to the collection of features available.
- The cloud-based solution’s capabilities, such as the protocols endorsed, the granularity of the traffic inspection mechanism, the analysis method, and so on.
- Versatility, such as the ability to create custom configurations and policies on the fly
- How the DDoS security approach can evaluate and distinguish legitimate traffic from malicious traffic. Due to their particular customer profile, different solutions can deliver different approaches, and different businesses may have different needs.
- Scalability is an important factor. How can we scale the cloud solution to meet the users’ changing needs?
- Support for specific hardware, as well as the availability of redundancy options.
- Different solutions can deliver very different levels of reporting depending on their approach to reporting/alerting systems. This is an important factor to remember since response time is crucial in DDoS mitigation.
Hybrid DDoS protection model
This approach incorporates the best of both worlds, providing a closed feedback loop between on-premise and cloud-based security solutions, as the name implies. This approach allows for more detailed attack reporting while also allowing us to custom-tailor a mitigation plan by integrating these tools.
The ability to incorporate a multi-tiered architecture where low-level DDoS attacks (layer 3 and layer 4) are mitigated with network-tier on-premise security such as IP credibility integration and robust firewalls is one of the main advantages of this strategy. The application tier will manage SSL termination and web-application firewall at the same time. On the other hand, cloud-based defence can shield an on-premise device from large-scale DDoS attacks, which are often the bane of on-premise security.
This method can provide robust DDoS security at all layers, shielding the device from randomised HTTP floods, DDoS bursts, protocol-level attacks, cache bypass, and other forms of DDoS attacks if done correctly.
DDoS protection tools
These applications can monitor the event log from numerous sources to find and detect DDoS activities. Below are the names of the most famous tools.
- Webroot DNS Protection
- Nginx
- BitNinja
- Cloudflare
- DDoS Protector
- HAProxy