The purpose of a volume-based DDoS attack is to cover a network with large amounts of traffic by filling the service bandwidth of the target victims. A large number of attack traffic prevents legitimate users from accessing an application or service, preventing traffic from entering or leaving. Depending on the target, stopping official traffic could mean that a bank customer may not be able to pay off credit on time, e-commerce customers may not be able to complete an online transaction, a hospital patient may be denied access to their medical records, or a citizen may find himself unable. to view their tax records at a public entity. Regardless of the organization, blocking people from the service they expect to use online has a detrimental effect.
Volumetric Attack uses botnets created by host forces and devices infected with malware. Controlled by an attacker, bots are used to create overcrowding between the target and the internet in bulk with malicious traffic that fills all available bandwidth.
Unexpected attacks on bot traffic can significantly reduce or prevent access to the web service or online service. As bots take up legitimate devices to maximize DDoS bandwidth attacks, often unknowingly to the user, malicious traffic is hard for the victim to detect.
The most common types of volumetric attacks
There are a variety of volumetric DDoS attack vectors used by intimidating players. Many use display and zoom methods to bypass a target network or service.
UDP flood
UDP floods are often preferred in DDoS attacks of large bandwidth. Attackers are trying to bypass holes in the host via IP packets that contain an unsupported UDP protocol. The victim host then looks at applications associated with UDP packets, and when they are not available, they send a “Reach Out” to the sender. IP addresses are often hijacked so that the attacker can be identified, and if the target host is full of attacks, the system is unresponsive and unavailable to legitimate users.
DNS reflection / amplification
DNS reflection attacks are a common type of vector where cybercriminals exploit the IP address of their target to send large numbers of requests to unlock DNS servers. In response, these DNS servers respond to malicious requests by corrupt IP addresses, thus creating targeted attacks with multiple DNS responses. Very quickly, a large amount of traffic created from DNS responds by overriding victim organization resources, making them unavailable, and preventing official traffic from reaching their destination.
ICMP floods
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is used for the error message and usually does not exchange data between systems. ICMP packets may be compatible with TCP Transmission Control packets that allow applications and devices to exchange messages over a network when connected to a server. ICMP flood is a DDoS Layer 3 attack system that uses ICMP messages to overload target network bandwidth.
Protocol Attack
Assault protocols try to exploit and eliminate the calculation capacity of various network infrastructure resources such as servers or security walls with malicious connection applications that take advantage of protocol communication. Synchronize (SYN) and Smurf DDoS floods are two common types of protocol-based DDoS attacks. Protocol attacks can be measured in packets per second (PPS) and bits per second (bps).
SYN flood attacks
One of the main ways people connect to online applications is through the Transmission Control Protocol TCP. This connection requires a three-way connection from the TCP service – such as a web server – and involves sending a so-called SYN (sync) packet where the user connects to the server, restoring the SYN-ACK (synchronization sync) package, which is ultimately turned on by the last connection ACK (approval) to complete the TCP handshake.
During an SYN flood attack, a malicious client sends a large number of SYN packets (one part of a standard handshake) but never sends an acknowledgment to complete the handshake. This leaves the server waiting for a response to this half-open TCP connection, which loses the ability to accept new connectivity services that track connection status.
The SYN flood attack is like a vicious game played by an entire high school graduate class, in which each student calls the same pizza restaurant and orders a pie at the same time. Then, when the delivery person goes to pack, he realizes that there are too many pizzas in his car and there are no addresses on orders.
Volumetric attacks will continue to be a threat as they grow in size and complexity. The safety of source devices is not something that victims of volumetric attacks can control. However, advances in DDoS attack protection allow network-edge electronic devices to capture incoming requests and automatically filter out bad traffic for good. Using real-time DDoS mitigation technology can significantly reduce the impact on your network, business, and customers.
