A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a cyber-attack in which the attackers seek to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. DDoS attacks account for a significant portion of security threats and latest attacks have been larger and more complex than ever before. Research firms are expecting the DDoS attack prevention market to grow 20% every year.
The Basic steps in DDoS are-
1) Detection – The DDoS attack detection involves identification of deviations in traffic flow from a normal to high traffic based on parameters like IP address, bandwidth, etc. The wide-global distribution of attacking sources makes it extremely hard for organizations to recognize real client traffic from attack traffic spread across many points of origin. DDoS detection is the key to quickly stop or mitigate attack and to do these two factors- 1) Speed of detection and 2) Accuracy of detection, play an important role.
2) Decision – Traffic is rerouted away from its target organization using DNS (Domain Name System) or other techniques and a decision must be taken whether to filter it or discard it completely. Discarding traffic completely affects an organization’s customers.
3) Analysis and Adaption – Analytics helps to gather and analyze information about the attack specific patterns such as repeating IP address range, certain processes misused. Security analytics techniques can provide a detailed comprehensive overview of attack traffic and instant understanding of attack. This information can be used to create new robust system and adapt to enhance future attack prevention.
Risk involved in DDoS attack for an Enterprise
DDoS attacks on an organization’s online service or website are time-consuming and expensive. Maximum organizations don’t have experience and technical experts to prevent DDoS attack. These attacks take down an enterprise firm in few minutes and the recovery process take several hours or weeks. An Organization’s network infrastructure comprises of a number of servers, computers and other IT assets. These may include web servers, FTP servers, email servers, ERP or CRM platforms. In a DDoS attack they are targeted resulting in downtime of organization’s business. The negative impact of such downtime can be felt by firm are expensive, it can affect website’s ranking on search engines and they may lose client’s trust, which results in revenue loss. All businesses irrespective of size and industry are vulnerable to DDoS attacks. The organizations having business records, financial data and customer information are more targeted.
DDoS Cloud based Risk Mitigation Services
DDoS mitigation services is a set of techniques or tools for defending or mitigating the effect of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Internet-connected networks by protecting the target at various levels of network. DDoS mitigation service can be deployed as a device on an organization’s premises or in their data centers, as a cloud service or hybrid of both. In this, they filter the traffic by accessing data repository stored in the Cloud, so regular customers are not affected. These services are customizable, reliable and can be Scaled up-down as per client’s need.
Big data and ML Integrated Solutions
DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent, Sophisticated and more effective with increasing speed of internet. The pool of potential attacks is now greater than ever considering the increasing availability of attacking tools and botnets. Humans are simply not enough to deter and block DDoS attacks and companies that rely on manual DDoS security and mitigation services are not completely protected against today’s and future threats. Big data Analytics systems can store and process huge data making it possible to have complete logs of raw data like IP address, which can be analyzed with the help of machine learning algorithms to prepare solutions that can help enterprises stay one step ahead of the DDoS attackers. This sector is still in initial phase of growth, but with time they will play a huge role in DDoS attack Prevention.
The main reason behind not buying a Distributed Denial of Service Protection Solution is the cost incurred in buying a service or dedicated team. The key to understanding the extent of the effect of DDoS attacks is to realize the importance or cost of network traffic being blocked or the downtime that will cost a business in terms of trust, reputation and money.
