Is Your Data Center Colocation Defending Against Today’s DDoS Attacks?

July 27, 2022

The global pandemic poses an immense challenge to colocation, hosting, and data center providers. Data center colocation and their customers continue to experience an increase in DDoS attacks. Cyber security threats have evolved tremendously in the past decade resulting in increased sophistication, frequency, and volume of cyber attacks. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, however, continue to be the leading risk to networks all around the globe. This is why it is critical to have DDoS Protection services. Providers put their clients first. Customers expect high reliability, speed, and security as they move servers between public and private clouds. However, the threats evoked by DDoS can be detrimental to a company’s servers and clients.

What is a DDoS Attack?

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a malicious attempt to overload the resources of a network, application, or service. The goal is to keep it from providing its service. Any business operating online may become a target of this threat in today’s environment.

The risk nowadays is that attacks are no longer isolated to one single point of entry. Instead, they may use many entry points. They often rely on compromised servers to forward spam, viruses, and other malware into your network. If an attack succeeds, it can cause server outages, poor service quality, and denied access for legitimate users. Hours of downtime can then put your revenue at risk.

How DDoS attacks work

DDoS attacks happen when someone aims an absurd amount of traffic at one server or several. The goal is to overload the server until it can no longer send or receive data. Then it fails under the load. You might wonder where all this traffic comes from. After all, one guy in his basement can only visit your website so many times, right?

These attacks typically come from a botnet of zombie PCs. Malware has infected each one. They all obey the guy in the basement when he commands them to visit www.yourbusiness.com. Depending on your hosting, the host may blacklist your site, or you may receive one crazy bandwidth bill. Oh, and the best part? It is relatively cheap to buy a DDoS attack from these sorts of characters. None of this is good for business, so here is what you need to know as an owner.

Who launches DDoS attacks

First and foremost, any business can come under DDoS attack, regardless of type. Usually, internet activists such as Anonymous launch these attacks. Some attacks appear to come from actual governments. The point is that many kinds of attackers exist. Any of them might take issue with you or your industry, and you might end up in the crosshairs. The scary part is that the sheer volume of data can easily overwhelm traditional defenses such as firewalls.

Slow DDoS attacks

Another thing to consider: DDoS attacks gobble up bandwidth, but they do not always arrive as knockout blows. That is what you typically hear about in the media, though. Sometimes DDoS attacks start small and ramp up. The network then runs slow and sluggish. You are not necessarily offline, but you might as well be if it gets bad enough. The traffic can keep growing until your server just quits and the attacker gets you offline. It is a dark parody of the tortoise and the hare. An immediate attack certainly gets your attention, but slow trouble over time seems almost natural until everything goes dark.

Today’s DDoS Attacks Threats:

DDoS attacks target different components of a network system. To see how each attack works, it helps to understand how a connection forms.

There are many layers to a network connection on the internet. Each layer varies from one another, yet all are critical to the overall functionality of the system.

The OSI model referenced below lays out the conceptual framework used in describing network connectivity in 7 distinct layers.

Nearly all DDoS attacks involve overwhelming a target device or network with traffic. However, these attacks fall into three main categories.

Volumetric DDoS attacks

The most common form and most frequently seen in the news is a major headline. The attacker floods the targeted network with traffic to consume all available bandwidth to the application.

In DNS amplification, attackers send large amounts of data to a target and congest its traffic.

Protocol attacks

Protocol attacks target the network layer. Even if attackers do not consume the whole network, firewalls and load balancers cannot efficiently process the flood of packets.

A SYN flood repeatedly sends initial connection request packets until they overwhelm all available ports on the server. Legitimate users then see sluggish traffic or none at all.

Application Layer Attacks

Application layer attacks target specific vulnerabilities within a specific server and force the application to handle illegitimate requests.

An HTTP flood is like constantly refreshing a web page on many computers at once. Large numbers of requests flood the server.

What is the right DDoS Attacks protection service for your organization?

DDoS mitigation services differ widely. Choosing the right DDoS Mitigation Service can be difficult. IT departments should ask their data centers a few questions, such as:

What is the cost of the service?

What disaster recovery plans are in place?
How will you deploy the service?
Will the addition of the service slow down performance?
How will the company notify you?
What experience does the data center have in handling cyberattacks?
How are they keeping current with the latest types of attacks?
What records can you keep to prosecute wrongdoers?

Thousands of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks occur every day. One attack may impact many more customers, so it is essential for companies to offer DDoS protection. The key concern in mitigating a DDoS attack is differentiating between normal customer traffic and attacker traffic.

One solution is Blackhole Routing. In its simplest form, blackhole routing sends all traffic from the site into a blackhole which acts as a defense. This may not be an ideal solution because the network becomes inaccessible. However, it still filters unwanted traffic away from the server.

Rate limiting is another strategy used for limiting network traffic. It limits the number of requests by capping how often someone can repeat an action within a certain timeframe.

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) can help mitigate an attack by quickly applying custom rules.

Anycast Network Diffusion scatters attack traffic across a wide network of distributed servers, and the network absorbs it.

Alone, all the methods listed/described may not be sufficient to effectively handle a complex DDoS attack. Therefore it is critical to implement the proper measures to effectively secure your data center colocation.

Testing DDoS Defenses:

Protecting infrastructure from DDoS attacks takes the right measures, but you also need to test your defenses. Testing finds vulnerabilities before a real threat exposes them. It is much better to be proactive and check for vulnerabilities rather than waiting for the lightning to strike.

Finding the right solution/partner:

Today’s threats require constant attention and concern. Whether or not you have DDoS mitigation, you must understand what an attack can do to your data center.

Ready to Learn More About Volico’s DDoS Mitigation Services?

For over two decades, Volico Data Centers has provided DDoS protection for enterprise and service provider customers worldwide. The solutions are state-of-the-art, highly effective, and automatic in real time. Volico’s DDoS protection of up to 3Gbps comes with every Bare Metal Dedicated Server and Colocation plan.

Speak with a Volico security professional to see what preventative measures your IT department should take against DDoS attacks. Discover how Volico can help you with your Managed Security needs.