DDoS stands for distributed denial of services, which causes a hindrance in the network or connectivity through a cyber-attack that leads to users being unable to use these services. These attacks are often caused by using tools that repeatedly send signals to a network, thus overwhelming it until it does not have the capacity to process authentic user requests.
Hackers usually have their eyes on attacking essential services that include platforms and web services employed by huge banks, educational institutes, businesses, and governments. DDoS attacks can take place in a number of ways such as protocol attacks, amplification-layer attacks, and volumetric attacks. Their way of causing damage is diverse, however, all of them use multiple fronts to launch an attack and incapacitate the victim by overwhelming their entire applications and infrastructure.
Top Tactics for DDoS Attack Prevention
If you are prepared for DDoS attacks, you will be well protected when that happen. You can put these DDoS protective measures in place to prevent further attacks.
- Prepare for an attack There is a false assumption among many SMBs that DDoS attackers will only come after your company if it is large like banks and the government. This makes them complacent when it comes to taking appropriate precautions against DDoS attackers. However, DDoS attacks can be launched for a multitude of reasons, such as an attempt at blackmail, a protest, or revenge by a disgruntled employee. Every business being conducted online incurs a substantial amount of ROI, which will then suffer if a DDoS attack overwhelms their service. You should also take into account the security measures taken by your web host to provide protection against DDoS attacks and if they will suffice to keep you safe.
- Multi-layered DDoS protection DDoS attacks in previous years were more often than not layer 3 or 4 volumetric attacks. These were known to target the transport of network layers. However, in recent times, there are many different varieties of DDOS attacks, with each layer or a combination of layers being targeted with a specific type of DDoS attack. So it is important to intelligently deal with DDoS attacks when it comes to protection, detection, and finding a solution. Your DDoS must provide you with several protective layers to keep you safe from DDoS attacks of all kinds, including volumetric ones.
- Contact your hosting provider or ISP You can let your hosting provider or ISP know that you’re being attacked and send help immediately. You should have a way to contact your hosting provider or ISP quickly, do keep their contact on hand. There is a good chance that the attack is already picked up by your web hosting provider or ISP, or they could have begun feeling the effect of that attack themselves and started becoming overwhelmed. Your ability to survive or hold your own against a DDoS attack is higher when you have a hosting centre housing your web server rather than it being handled by you. The difference is that your company will have substantially fewer bandwidth links as well as capacity routers compared to a data centre. Plus the staff of a fully functional data centre will be much more equipped to deal with such attacks. One more advantage of having your web server located at a data centre is that it protects your corporate LAN from the barrage of DDoS traffic and at it, which keeps your email and VoIP services from being affected by this attack. In case the DDoS attack is on a huge scale, the strategy your web host or ISP might employ is rendering your traffic a “null route”, that basically includes all the packets intended for your web server to be dealt with even if they reach their intended target.
- Build Redundancy Into Your Infrastructure A DDoS attack on your servers can be stopped from becoming successful if they are located in several data centres that have a fantastic system for load balancing that helps dispense traffic along with them. Ideally, try to use data centres that are geographically spread out in various countries or regions in a single country. For this to work, however, you need several networks connecting these data centres, along with avoiding network bottlenecks and failure points on the network that could be exploited. When you have your server placed in several different locations, you make it difficult for the attacker to launch an attack on your entire server. Even if one portion of your server suffers damage due to a DDoS attack, the remaining parts of your server are kept safe and can handle a bit of the traffic the attacked server is rendered incapable of handling.
Conclusion
You need to be aware of how a DDoS attack happens to deal with it successfully. You can take the support of your dedicated server or VPS hosting provider to deal with the attack launched on your shared or dedicated server, among others. Prevention is always better than cure. So employ the measures mentioned above to keep your system safe from any DDoS attacks.
