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How to Mitigate DDoS Attacks and the Impact on Availability

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are intended to overwhelm a network or server and cause failure or work stoppage. DDoS attacks first appeared in the mid-1990s and continue to the present day. Far from going away, they have become more prevalent: in the first quarter of 2024, the number of DDoS attacks against web servers increased by 93% compared to the same period a year earlier. One survey found that nearly 70% of organizations experienced 20 to 50 DDoS attacks per month.

One reason for the frequency and persistence of DDoS attacks is that they are very cost-effective: an attacker can launch a DDoS attack for a small cost but cause millions of dollars in damages and lost business opportunities. Attackers can rent an online resource to launch an attack for $5 per hour but cause small and online businesses to lose $8,000 to $74,000 per hour of downtime. In December 2022, the Department of Justice took control of 48 websites offering DDoS attack services.

What Is a DoS Attack

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is aimed at a specific asset or application with the intent of exhausting the target’s resources and causing downtime, or at least making the target’s services inaccessible to legitimate users. Service disruptions can lead to outages, financial losses, and damage to trust and the reputation of the owner of the asset or application.

The three main categories of DoS attacks are:

• Volume-Based Attacks. The attacker sends an overwhelming amount of traffic or requests to the target, intending to exhaust its available bandwidth or system resources and make it unable to process legitimate requests.
• Protocol-Based Attacks. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in network protocols or services to degrade the services of network equipment. For example, an attacker may overwhelm firewalls or load balancers. The attack may also flood a target with SYN requests (SYN flood) or pings (Ping of Death).
• Application Layer-Based Attacks. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in applications or services running on the target system. They exploit vulnerabilities in the targeted application, causing it to malfunction or use up its processing resources.

What Is a DDoS Attack?

A DDoS attack uses multiple sources to launch the attack. Often, the attack employs hundreds or thousands of coordinated platforms to carry out the attack. These platforms are usually compromised computers, known as botnets. Each botnet sends a flood of requests or traffic to the target. The large number of computers and the distributed nature of a DDoS attack make it more difficult to defend against than a DoS attack. But both can cause significant damage.

How to Mitigate the Impact of DDoS Attacks on Service Availability

A DDoS attack on your organization can bring down critical servers and network resources for long periods. This can lead to lost productivity, missed revenue, and damage to your organization’s reputation.

DDoS attacks are frequent and unpredictable in their timing. But attackers often probe for vulnerable systems before starting a DDoS attack. So, your organization can implement security best practices to minimize the possibility of a successful attack and the potential damage should one occur.

Here are some steps you can take to protect yourself against DDoS attacks:

Assess the Risk

You can identify the critical assets and vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure, systems, and applications. By focusing on mission-critical services that are exposed to the public Internet, you can be proactive in protecting those services. A properly configured web application firewall and other recommended security practices like software updates, strong passwords, and server hardening can lower the risk of a successful attack.

Monitor the Network and Server

Continuous monitoring can help you quickly detect unusual or anomalous traffic or user behavior that might indicate a DDoS attack. Monitoring services like Uptime’s unified availability monitoring can help you keep track of the status of your websites, domains, mail servers, and more. Uptime’s SSL, ping, DNS, and port monitoring can help detect a DDoS attack, and automated alerting can send instant notifications by phone, email, and SMS.

Configure the Firewall

You might consider configuring your firewalls to block suspicious traffic or traffic from malicious IP addresses. Rate limits and firewall rules can help prevent excessive traffic flows.

Balance the Load

Load balancing distributes traffic between multiple servers and IT service centers. This can help servers share the load and prevent traffic from overloading any one platform.

Update the Bandwidth Capacity

As your business grows, you may consider increasing your bandwidth capacity to enable it to handle the sudden spikes during a DDoS attack. This can help mitigate the effects of an attack.

Set Up Redundancy and Failover

Redundant network and web resources can help maintain service availability in the event of an attack by failing over or distributing traffic to alternate platforms.

Improve Web Application Security

Secure coding practices and regular audits of web applications can help reduce vulnerabilities in your web applications. Vulnerable web applications are a frequent target of DDoS attacks.

Conduct Penetration Testing

Penetration testing can help you identify vulnerabilities in your web and network infrastructure that might be targets of DDoS attacks.

Utilize Captchas

Captchas on websites or public online services can help distinguish human users from automated bots, thereby preventing DDoS attacks before they start. By requiring human responses before providing web, network, or application services, your servers can use Captchas as a preventive measure against DDoS attacks.

Service Provider Measures

Your ISP and cloud service provider may have DDoS protections in place. Contact your service providers and review your service agreements to determine protections and any risks or limitations in coverage.

Implementing DDoS Response Plans

Even with the most robust defenses, a DDoS attack may still succeed. Your response plan will guide your organization through all stages of identifying, mitigating, and recovering from DDoS attacks. Your DDoS business continuity plan should identify how to keep critical functions running during and after an attack and how senior management can communicate with IT personnel, external service providers, and organizational stakeholders. You should regularly test these plans to ensure employee familiarity and identify any gaps.

DDoS attacks can be devastating to an organization. Effective monitoring can help you identify, prevent, and mitigate an attack. To learn more about Uptime’s comprehensive monitoring services, try for free, or schedule a demo, visit Uptime.com.

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