What is DDoS and effective website protection strategies in 2023

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a cyber attack in which an attacker (hacker) attempts to bring down an online service by flooding it with traffic from multiple sources.

A DDoS attack disrupts the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or surrounding infrastructure with Internet traffic access. DDoS attacks achieve their purpose by using multiple compromised computer systems as the source of attack traffic. Mined machines can include computers and other networked resources such as IoT devices. DDoS is a form of attack on a server that contains a website, exhausting server system resources, flooding internet traffic and disrupting user connections.

The most obvious sign of a DDoS attack is a business website or service that suddenly becomes slow or unavailable. In addition, other basic signs such as:

• The traffic indicators suddenly increased sharply, abnormally.
• Cannot access websites, even if your network connection is still stable.

But for a number of reasons — such spikes in traffic can also create similar performance issues, often requiring further investigation and analysis. Traffic analysis tools can help you detect several telltale signs of a DDoS attack:

• Suspicious amount of traffic originating from an IP address or IP range.
• A large amount of traffic from users who share a behavioral profile, such as device type, geographic location, or web browser version.
• A spike in requests for a page or endpoint unexplained.
• Strange traffic patterns, such as spikes at odd hours of the day, or patterns that seem unnatural (e.g. spikes every 10 minutes).

3.1. Customer experience

Customers are always king for any business, so if your website is attacked by DDoS, it can have a big impact on the user experience. The user may then switch to another website for the same product or service. Competition is fierce in all industries and finding a similar alternative is easy. Therefore, to ensure customer loyalty to the business, it is necessary to think seriously about how to prevent DDoS attacks.

3.2. Reputation

Customers always choose companies they can trust. As a result, being vulnerable to cyber attacks reduces customer confidence in your business. Having a DDoS attack will put your company badly and make your customers think twice about doing business with you or leaving their personal information in your care.

3.3. Financial alue

A network under a DDoS attack will result in the loss of data, property, and other resources. The cost of repairing, rebuilding, or purchasing new equipment, and repairing a hacked network can affect a business's revenue and expenditure. In addition, the network system is disrupted causing business processes to be affected, negatively affecting the profitability of the business.

3.4. Reduced business productivity

A DDoS attack, even if it doesn't completely disable your system, will still make your processes run much slower. Abnormally high volumes of traffic clog the channels in your system, increasing the amount of time it takes to receive and respond to requests and complete tasks.

3.5. Your SEO ranking can be affected

If your site is slow or inactive, Google will likely lower its ranking in the results pages, making your business less visible to potential customers. Google will not assume the problem is caused by a DDoS attack. If the problem is not resolved immediately, the search engine will interpret your slow loading speed as the new status quo and will recalculate your rankings accordingly.

3.6. Businesses can lose data

Important information can be stolen or destroyed by an attack while the attack is in progress. A DDoS attack usually precedes a data breach. It is used to knock down corporate firewalls or distract the corporate IT team from impending data theft. An old, albeit very relevant, example happened to Sony when a coordinated DDoS attack in 2011 distracted the company while hackers stole the account information of more than 77 million people used on PlayStation Network and Qriocity.

Today, there are many diverse and sophisticated types of DDoS attacks, requiring businesses to have a comprehensive protection solution. Basically, businesses need to pay attention to three common types of DDoS attacks below:

4.1. Volume-based attack

Volume-based attack is the most common type of DDoS attack and works by overwhelming the server's capacity with a large amount of false data requests. Attackers will often use amplification techniques to generate requests without consuming large amounts of resources. While the server is busy checking for these malicious data requests, legitimate traffic cannot pass through. Volume-base attack includes common attack methods such as: UDP flood, ICMP flood,...

4.2 Protocol attack

Protocol attack is a type of attack that focuses on exploiting server resources. This attack focuses on vulnerabilities in Layer 3 or Layer 4 of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. That means they will use up memory, processor cores, or overload the device power or the networks between the targeted system and the user at the other end. Protocol attack includes common attack methods such as: SYN floods, Ping of death, Smurf, Teardrop...

4.3. Application attacks

Application attack is an attack that targets web applications. This is considered the most sophisticated and dangerous type of attack. These are attacks that focus on Layer 7 in the OSI model. They focus primarily on web traffic and can be launched via HTTP, HTTPS, DNS or SMTP. They work by attacking vulnerabilities in the application that prevent the application from providing content to the user. HTTP GET is one of the most common methods of Application attack.

One of the reasons why application layer attacks are difficult to prevent is because they use less resources. This makes it look like a higher legit traffic and fools the server. Hackers can also combine these methods to launch a multi-pronged attack on a target.

5.1. UDP Flood

UDP Flood is an attack method that sends a large number of User Datagram Protocol packets to the target server to reduce the device's ability to process and respond. UDP Floods can also compromise the firewalls that protect the target server.

5.2. SYN Flood

SYN Flood is an attack method that targets weaknesses in the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) connection chain, through incomplete connections. When the user makes a TCP Syn request, he will not receive a response from the server, which means that the connection is not active. The attacker will consume all available resources on the server to make the servers not have enough traffic for legitimate access. Attackers target the target servers by repeatedly sending SYN connection requests, making it impossible for clients to respond.

5.3. HTTP Flood

HTTP Flood is an attack method that uses a large number of botnets and computers. Due to the use of malicious software, these computers were mostly controlled. This form uses less bandwidth than other forms, but the servers will be forced to use up the maximum amount of available resources.

5.4. Ping of Death

Ping of Death is an attack method by manipulating IP protocols, by sending large numbers of malicious pings to a system. In particular, this attack method is common on Windows NT operating systems and below and was very popular two decades ago. Therefore, it can be said that, at present, the Ping of Death attack is no longer highly effective.

5.5. Smurf Attack

Smurf is an attack method by exploiting IP addresses and Internet control message protocols (ICMP), through malicious programs called Smurf. An attacker will pretend to take the source IP address as an attack target, thereby pinging multiple ICMPs to Broadcast addresses on multiple networks. This will cause this IP address to receive a large number of ICMP packet responses, making the network slow or unavailable to other services.

5.6. Fraggle Attack

Fraggle Attack is a method of attacking a router's broadcast network through the use of a lot of UDP traffic. This method is quite similar to Smurf, but it does not use much ICMP.

5.7. Slowloris

Slowloris is a method of attacking target websites by using only a few resources. Because Slowloris is a tool that allows an attacker through it to crash another server without consuming too much bandwidth. Slowloris makes it possible to attack applications through multiple HTTP requests, always keeping connections open to the target server and keeping that connection open at all times.

5.8. NTP Amplification

NTP Amplification is an attack method with packets that an attacker exploits from an active NTP (Network Time Protocol) server. Due to a large number of UDP amplification, this causes the target server or the network to be overloaded.

5.9. HTTP GET

HTTP GET is a multi-target attack method on small-scale application layers. The goal of HTTP GET is to target applications with many weaknesses, especially the 7th layer (Layer 7) because this is the layer with the highest network traffic. This type of attack typically uses standard URLs instead of large or corrupt files. Therefore, it is relatively difficult to resist this type of attack.

5.10. Advanced persistent Dos (APDos)

Advanced Persistent Dos (ApDos) is an attack method that combines all other forms of attack such as HTTP Flood, SYN Flood, etc. This is a complex and dangerous attack method. These types of attacks are always expected to cause serious damage. This attack is extremely large and persistent because it can last for weeks to months.

If you're server and software savvy, or if the business has an IT department, there are several manual approaches to managing DDoS attacks. The most common method of dealing with minor attacks is rate limiting, which means you limit how often an attacker's actions are repeated. Because DDoS attacks happen continuously, you will be able to spot the difference between valid and invalid traffic. For those who don't know how to manage or limit network traffic, there are some simple steps to deal with DDoS attacks easily and quickly to prevent the worst consequences as follows:

Step 1: Contact your digital security provider

Contact your third-party security partner first. When support is needed, they can resolve your issue quickly.

Step 2: Notify IT

During a DDoS attack, you might want to try to catch everything before alerting you to the attack. However, this runs the risk of delaying the solution and interfering with the workflow, because multiple people may end up fixing the problem — or even the wrong one. That's why you should notify your IT department and any other potentially affected employees as soon as possible.

Step 3: Consider steps to minimize DDoS damage

As a first step upload your security software to see if you can start blocking IP addresses yourself. At this point in the process, you often want to know how to fix your router after a DDoS attack. You can do this by unplugging the router's power cable for 15 to 30 seconds, then rebooting.

To prevent and deal with increasingly sophisticated and diverse DDoS, requires businesses to have effective solutions as follows:

7.1. Build vast server infrastructure

The main reason why a website crashes (or crashes) or crashes is because it can't handle the traffic caused by the DDoS attack. The situation where the number of users accessing the website at the same time is too large will lead to the server being overloaded. Having a system with a large amount of bandwidth and server capacity is a very good way to prevent and reduce DDoS attacks. However, this requires businesses to invest in huge infrastructure costs. Therefore, businesses often tend to go through a third party that specializes in providing and owning powerful infrastructure to ensure the most effective and cost-effective security system.

7.2. Use secure platforms

The use of a web application firewall (Web Application Firewall / WAF) is the best and most modern way to combat Layer 7 DDoS today, especially for enterprise website systems. WAF will help detect and fight DDoS by monitoring, analyzing, and blocking unusual traffic. Especially for the current trend, businesses are turning to Cloud WAF, which helps to store unlimited object data and access data continuously. The Cloud WAF system will always be up-to-date and highly scalable so it can intelligently prevent the latest security holes from harming your website.

7.3. Applying content transmission technology

The application of technology CDN to support the prevention and mitigation of damage from DDoS Layer 3, Layer 4 is becoming more and more popular. Content Delivery Network (CDN) will help balance traffic to the Website and distribute them to many different servers around the globe. Thereby it will be more difficult for attackers to target the Website. Especially, in the current trend, the application of Multi CDN in one platform with CDN Power-Ups will help your system to activate the best CDNs like VNCDN, Cloudflare, Akamai.

7.4. Increase system performance

A system to withstand DDoS attacks needs to have the ability to operate automatically, quickly, and accurately.

Load Balancing System

Owning a smart load balancing system (AI Load Balancing) will help differentiate and intelligently distributes traffic spikes from DDoS attacks based on latency, availability, and geo-location data. Load balancing will help you deliver the best user experience and website performance.

Security Operations Center (SOC)

SOC is built on demand, to ensure the best experience for users. Businesses will have to build a team of people, operations, and technology to continuously monitor and analyze DDoS attacks. Thereby, performing responses and handling actions promptly. The construction of a SOC system requires a large investment. Therefore, the adoption of a third-party SOC system with 24/7 support is a worthwhile option for businesses.

Global Anti DDoS Scrubbing Centers

Scrubbing Centers is a hub that handles all incoming traffic. Monitoring centers will prevent large DDoS attacks targeting the network layer (layer 3), transport layer (layer 4), application layer (layer 7), etc. When attacked, traffic will be forwarded to Scrubbing Centers to analyze and remove malicious, fake traffic. Simultaneously, clean traffic is returned to the network for distribution to servers without disrupting service.

When choosing anti-DDoS service providers, businesses need to consider and pay attention to the following criteria to choose the best service: Multi CDN, Cloud WAF, AI Load Balancing Multi CDN, Global Anti DDoS Scrubbing Centers, CDN Power-Ups, Global SOC.

In addition, businesses also need to consider other factors such as easily integrated technology, care services, quick, timely and professional technical support, ... are also factors that help. Enterprises achieve the best performance when choosing to cooperate with anti-DDoS service providers.

One thing is for sure, the vast majority of businesses don't have the resources or expertise to devote themselves entirely to IT security. Therefore, you need an alliance of support from many partners to help you protect your company's Website against DDoS attacks. You can refer to VNIS - a comprehensive anti-DDoS Web/App security platform for Layer 3/4/7. Register to experience the VNIS platform of VNETWORK by leaving your contact information in the form below or call the hotline: (028) 7306 8789, our experts will assist you.