DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are becoming an increasingly common threat to businesses of all sizes.
By overwhelming servers or networks with a flood of traffic, these attacks can cause serious disruptions, ranging from slow website performance to complete service outages.
To stay protected, it’s important to understand how DDoS attacks work and what proactive steps you can take to defend your server.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through practical strategies to prevent and mitigate DDoS threats effectively.
What is a DDoS attack?
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack aims to overwhelm a server, service, or network by flooding it with excessive internet traffic. This can lead to serious disruptions, including slow website performance, service outages, or complete system downtime.
While phishing and malware remain prevalent cyber threats, DDoS attacks are increasingly becoming a major concern for businesses.
Given the potential for widespread disruption, DDoS prevention should be a key component of any cybersecurity strategy. A proactive approach not only minimizes downtime but also helps maintain business continuity and a seamless user experience.
Tips To Prevent Your Server from DDoS Attacks
Here are some helpful tips that can strengthen your server’s defenses against DDoS attacks.
1. Reduce Attack Surface Area
Minimizing potential target areas limits attackers’ options and strengthens defenses in a central location. We need to ensure that our application and resources are not exposed to any ports, protocols, or applications that we do not intend to communicate with.
By minimizing potential points of attack, we can effectively focus our mitigation efforts. Consider using computation resources behind CDNs or Load Balancers. This approach helps restrict direct Internet traffic to specific areas of your infrastructure, like database servers.
Additionally, you can use firewalls or access control lists (ACLs) for regulating traffic to your applications.
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2. Caching
A cache works like a helpful storage space that keeps copies of the content you’ve requested, which means that fewer requests need to be sent back to the original servers.
By using a content delivery network (CDN) to cache resources, organizations can reduce the load on their servers, making it easier to handle both genuine requests and malicious ones, ensuring everything runs smoothly.
3. Applying The Multi-layered DDoS Protection
DDoS attacks have evolved significantly since they were first introduced 5-10 years ago. Back then, most DDoS attacks focused on Layer 3 or 4, which meant they primarily targeted the network or transport layers.
However, nowadays, we see a variety of DDoS attacks that can target different layers, such as the network layer, transport layer, session layer, and application layer, or even combinations of these layers!
Additionally, attackers continually devise innovative methods to disrupt access to websites for legitimate users and develop advanced strategies to exploit vulnerabilities, resulting in increasingly complex attacks.
To effectively prevent DDoS attacks, it’s essential to go beyond simply boosting bandwidth or relying on standard firewalls. It involves a multi-layered strategy with defenses designed to combat application-layer DDoS attacks.
Your solution has to be scalable and come with built-in redundancies. Additionally, it should feature traffic monitoring capabilities, detect any business logic flaws, and have robust vulnerability management features.
4. Set DDoS Priority Buckets
Are all web resources created equal? What resources would you like to prioritize for protection? Start by identifying the key priorities and critical aspects of your web resources to strengthen DDoS security.
For instance, your business and data-centered web assets should be classified as critical and deserve 24/7 DDoS protection.
- Critical: Assets vital to business operations (e.g., payment systems, user data).
- High: Systems affecting productivity (e.g., email, internal portals).
- Normal: Non-critical assets or static content.
- Inactive/Unused: Retire or disconnect from the network.
You can create a priority bucket for unused domains, networks, applications, and services. Remove them from the business network promptly. This is how you can secure your server from DDoS!
5. Proactive Traffic Monitoring
Monitoring your network traffic is like having an intelligent security system! It assists in identifying unusual activity patterns, such as sudden traffic coming in, which signal a potential DDoS attack.
By being vigilant, you can respond quickly and prevent potential threats from escalating. It’s all about staying one step ahead and noticing the early warning signs before they turn into significant issues.
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Tools To Prevent DDoS Attacks
Learn more about the DDoS mitigation tools that you can use to prevent DDoS attacks:
a. Web Application Firewall (WAF):
A WAF serves as a shield against attacks by using customizable policies to filter, inspect, and block harmful HTTP traffic between web applications and the Internet.
By adopting a WAF, organizations can easily develop a flexible security model that helps manage incoming traffic from selected locations and IP addresses in a positive way.
b. Always-on DDoS mitigation:
A DDoS mitigation provider plays a crucial role in safeguarding your network by continuously analyzing traffic patterns, making timely policy adjustments in response to new threats, and maintaining a robust and dependable network of data centers.
When exploring cloud-based DDoS mitigation services, seek out a provider that delivers adaptable, scalable, and round-the-clock protection against both sophisticated and high-volume attacks.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know how to stop a DDoS attack using the available techniques and tools, be sure to stay vigilant and not overlook any potential threats. Keeping a close eye on the situation and actively monitoring will empower you to respond effectively.
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