DDoS Attack Types & Mitigation Methods

November 20, 2018

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make any online service dysfunctional or unavailable by overwhelming it with requests and web traffic. This overloads the servers with requests, so the web service or website essentially crashes. The attacks target a variety of resources like banks, news sites, and even government websites. They present a major threat to institutions that are in danger of losing important information.

Attackers carry it out by building networks of infected computers called botnets. They spread malware through emails, websites, and now social media to grow the botnet. Attackers can then control these machines remotely, often without the owners’ knowledge, and use them as an army to attack a single target. Attackers usually carry out a DDoS attack through millions of machines at once.

Types of DDoS Attacks

There are different types of DDoS attacks which overwhelm sites and services differently. For example, the first type is a volume-based attack that saturates the bandwidth of the targeted site. You measure its magnitude in Bits per second (Bps).

Protocol attacks target actual server resources, including firewalls and load balancers, and overwhelm the intermediate communication equipment. You measure the magnitude in Packets per second (Pps).

Application Layer Attacks target weaknesses in software such as Apache, Windows, or OpenBSD. They use requests that seem benign, but they overload the system and crash the web server. You measure their magnitude in Requests per second (Rps).

Mitigation Methods

There are several approaches to mitigating DDoS attacks. However, some are more effective than others. The most straightforward approach is the DIY approach. It’s not very effective as you could probably surmise because not everyone is computer savvy or educated in programming and hacking to understanding how to do it themselves. Most people don’t recognize different types of attacks when they happen and don’t know how to respond if the attackers change their methods mid-hack.

You can also use ‘on-premise appliances’ to mitigate the DDoS attack. These appliances offer advanced traffic filtering, combining geo-blocking, rate limiting, IP reputation, and signature identification. This is an effective way to alleviate the damage from your everyday DDoS attacks. However, the drawbacks here are the ability to handle excessive traffic, which caps out at 10 Gbps in most networks, the need to manually deploy appliances to stop an attack, and the maintenance and purchase costs of the appliances themselves.

Compared to those options, the final and most effective method is the ‘off-premise cloud-based solution.’ This involves paying a company to handle your traffic for you and protect it against any type of DDoS attack. As a result, you’re not relying on home appliances and don’t need to worry about capping bandwidth. They don’t require the upkeep and maintenance that on-site appliances do, and they have professionals that know what they’re doing to the letter.

There also exists an on-demand option to stop network layer attacks. Instead of relying on hardware, it stops volume and protocol attacks by rerouting traffic.