DDoS attacks can bombard an organization’s network with traffic taking down online services and applications resulting in the prevention of genuine users from accessing the firm’s services. They often lead to lost revenues, loss of customers and damage to the brand. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that there is a lot to be done. Even though an enterprise firm can’t predict when an attack will occur the steps can be taken to minimize the impact of an attack and set up a backup to recover fast.
List Vulnerable Assets
To protect assets from DDoS attacks first step for security teams is to find the most vulnerable and valuable assets. They need to start by listing all attackable assets. Example – Servers, Applications, IP addresses and Domains.
Mapping assets will help security teams to identify points of vulnerability and construct defensive strategies.
Estimate Potential Damages
Assess the value and importance of each asset to properly allocate protection money/resources. An important point that companies should consider is certain damages are direct, while others can be indirect.
Loss of clients – Client loss is one of the most serious possible repercussions of a successful DDoS attack.
Productivity loss – Firms that rely on online services like email, online storage or databases, the unavailability of these services will result in a productivity loss.
Direct revenue loss – If a company’s online service generates revenue effectively on a regular basis, any downtime will result in a direct revenue loss.
Brand damage – Accessibility and the digital experience are more closely linked to a company’s brand. A cyberattack that results in a loss of online service will have an impact on a company’s brand and reputation.
Assigning Tasks
The responsibility of managing DDoS attacks should be distributed to respective people –
1. CISO and security team should manage the overall DDoS attack coordinating with other teams.
2. Network administrators should communicate with the security team to mitigate DDoS attacks.
3. Teams handling specific applications or online services like cloud storage should coordinate with the security team to provide details and assistance if there’s a DDoS attack.
Deploy and Manage DDoS Solution
After assessing the most vulnerable assets and expenses security team should set up an attack detection strategy. This strategy should be designed in consideration with the DDoS solution deployed by the company. How DDoS solution is being deployed on the cloud or on-premises?
Routing entire traffic through a firewall reduces the need for a diversion. This form of security is perfect for a critical application that simply cannot afford any downtime.
The backup must be created. A separate backup of the most important or critical assets should be created. While creating backup it must be integrated and tested with restoring process and systems to make restoration seamless.
After deploying the DDoS solution, it should be scaled up with the growth of the organization as new customers, systems, users, and devices are added. Once the DDoS solution is set up, the mitigation strategies for various DDoS attack scenarios must be planned.
Update and maintenance schedule of the DDoS solution should be planned. The database of malicious traffic like IP addresses must be updated on regular basis by the vendor. The regular trials of various defensive strategies of DDoS must be conducted with the assistance of the vendor.
The key to a DDoS solution lies in filtering or shifting possibly dangerous traffic away from networks and application infrastructure.
