Everyone hears about them daily and has heard about them lately too, but the ground reality of these attacks is still taken for granted. Why? Because the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have grown, as well as in scale, in direct proportion to internet proliferation.
The options for combating DDoS attacks at first were limited as the nature of those attacks did not evolve back then. Now the options for battling and countering them have increased. One of the best options in DDoS protection takes advantage of the inherited distributed nature of Cloud to protect servers from bad traffic on a global scale.
Experts from a DDoS Protection Service provider based in New York City call it Cloud DDoS Protection, also known as Cloud Anti-DDoS service.
A modern DDoS attack – what does it look like?
Distrubed Denial of Service (abbreviated as DDoS) at the ground zero level takes place when a distributed network of machines sends a monumental amount of malevolent data to a server or network targeted. These attacks deny service by crowding out legitimate users trying to reach the main server, when they take place.
These networked machines are often either servers built for this purpose for carrying out the attack (depending whether or not the attackers have enough money to get hardware like this), or are an organized network of bots known commonly as a botnet.
What are botnets? Experts in the industry explain they consisted of compromised machines, like home devices which are connected to the internet. Personal computers, laptops and servers make up some of these bots.
However, a vast majority of them are devices no one would actually think of, like a home-networked security camera system, air-conditioning systems, a refrigerator and other similar devices forming part of what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT).
Tricky and malicious code can be hidden nicely in web ads. When a user on mobile clicks on them, they participate in an attack whilst they are carrying out something supported by the ad (like a game, a survey etc.). In short, machines carrying DDoS attacks can be found anywhere and they all work together to take down their target.
How can a firm protect itself against a DDoS attack?
There are numerous ways for firms to protect themselves against a DDoS attack. The simplest method is to just discard all traffic which is coming to the server being targeted (i.e. blackholing). Both legitimate and malignant content will be removed but that will protect the network from being choked and strangled.
The other simplest method is to obtain more internet bandwidth than the attackers. Say if a server/company’s server is attacked by 5 Gbps of malevolent traffic while the users only need around 1 Gbps of legitimate traffic, and they have around 8 Gbps available to them, then they are clear of such attacks.
However, these methods are not feasible for everyone as Netflix is among those companies that was taken down by a targeted DDoS attack some time before too.
There is another solution that does require considerable effort, and that is to scrub the data. What happens here is that, through the use of an algorithm the firm or its network service provider examines data before it reaches the server being targeted. Afterwards, the malignant traffic is removed and even blocked, allowing real-time legitimate traffic to reach the server.
In this way, the DDoS protection service is completely outsourced to the protection service provider. The advantages are many, among them being the server protected effectively from the impact and users not even feeling any adverse impacts on the internet service.
However, there is a disadvantage and that is the scrubbing activity is limited by the amount of bandwidth the DDoS protection service provider has. If there is a large attack that can overwhelm the scrubber, what would happen?
Using DDoS protection service for cloud
Botnets have a worldwide network and companies need to defend themselves in a global way. This is where Cloud DDoS protection comes in handy. It makes use of numerous worldwide scrubbing centers by scrubbing attacker traffic near the source of the attack instead of the destination. This prevents the attack from getting near the targeted server.
