DDoS has emerged as a choice of weapon for hackers. DDoS attackers not only use it to target individual websites and servers of the network, but also subdue the network itself. The growing dependency and usage of the Internet, makes the impact of successful DDoS attacks more challenging for service providers and other enterprises, costing them thousands of money lost in revenue and productivity. DDoS attackers employ much sophisticated spoofing techniques and protocols day by day and it has become essential to develop a solution that has been designed to specifically detect and destroy DDoS attacks to help the businesses and enterprises run efficiently.
DDoS attacks overwhelmed servers, network links and network devices by disrupting Internet systems. The attackers utilize multiple hosts that may be managed or undermined by collaborators in order to attack the target. Each of these hosts part take in the attack and produce a stream of requests to overburden the proposed target. DDoS attacks can govern up to thousands of compromised hosts against a single target. These hosts are acquired from unprotected computers accessing the Internet. ‘Sleeper’ codes can be implanted on these computers and by that way the attackers can launch a DDoS attack.
How do DDoS attacks work?
DDoS attacks make use of internet protocols and the Internet-delivering data packets from more or less any source to any destination. Fundamentally, the behavior of these packets determines the type of DDoS attack; either there can be numerous overwhelming network devices and servers, or they can be purposely incomplete to consume server resources faster. Illegitimate packets are indistinguishable from legitimate packets, and many of these attacks use spoofed IP address sources, making the detection and identification of DDoS attacks more problematic.
There are two most basic types of DDoS attacks:
* Bandwidth attacks: They use resources such as network bandwidth or equipment by overloading one or both with high volumes of packets. Targeted routers, servers and firewalls that might have limited handling resources, might become unavailable to process valid transactions and thus lead to their failure. Packet-flooding attack is the most common form of bandwidth attack.
* Application attacks: They use predicted behavior of protocols such as TCP and HTTP to type up computational resources and prevents them from processing transactions and requests. Two examples of application attacks include HTTP half open and HTTP error attacks.
Growing DDoS Threat
Nowadays DDoS attackers are largely using sophisticated spoofing techniques and essential protocols to make DDoS attacks more troublesome. These attacks use legitimate application protocols and services and are very difficult to detect and triumph over. Utilizing packet-filtering or rate-limiting measures helps the attacker’s mission by shutting all down and resulting in retraction of legitimate users.
Upon detection of a DDoS attack, a victim typically responds by asking the closest upstream connectivity provider-an Internet service provider, a hosting provider, or a backbone carrier to try to identify the source. Spoofed address can make the identification process long and tedious and even when a source has been identified, blocking it would mean blocking all traffic-good and bad.
‘Blackholing’ is a process by which the service provider blocks all traffic intended for the targeted company as far as possible, and sends the diverted traffic to a ‘black hole’. This helps to save the provider’s network and customers. Routers use access control lists to filter out unwanted traffic in an effort to defend against simple and known DDoS attacks. Due to the sophisticated types of DDoS attacks encountered today, blackholing and router filtering are not useful as a defense mechanism.
Even though Firewalls offer a simple level of protection, they are not able to surpass the advanced types of attacks encountered today. Firewalls predominantly control access to private networks by tracking sessions initiated from inside to an outside service and then accepting only specific replies from expected sources on the outside. But this does not offer protection against DDoS attacks as the access is open to the general public to receive requests and hackers simply use the “approved” protocol to carry out their attack. Also, firewalls lack anti-spoofing capabilities. When a DDoS attack is detected, firewalls can shut down a specific flow associated with the attack, but they cannot perform anti-spoofing on a packet-by-packet basis.
Intrusion Detection Systems [IDS] provides some great attack detection capabilities, but is not able to lessen the impact of the attacks. Most of the DDoS attacks today use valid packets and IDS can’t detect DDoS attacks using valid packets. Although IDSs do offer some anomaly-based capabilities, which are required to detect such attacks, they require extensive manual tuning by experts and do not identify the specific attack flows. IDSs are optimized for signature-based application layer attack detection. Because today’s sophisticated DDoS attacks are shaped by atypical behavior at Layers 3 and 4, current IDS technology is not optimized for DDoS detection.
Also, enterprise operators may try over provisioning. It means buying excess bandwidth or redundant network devices to handle any spikes in demand. But it is very expensive to be used as a DDoS prevention strategy. Today’s attackers can easily defeat this by increasing the volume of the attack and hence it is not useful as protection mechanism against complex DDoS attacks today.
In summary, the protection strategies that were useful before are no longer beneficial anymore due to the ever increasingly complex and bothersome DDoS attacks.
The Need for DDoS Protection:
Businesses will have a number of reasons to invest in DDoS protection. Large enterprises, government organizations, service providers are all required to protect the components of their infrastructure such as Web servers, DNS servers, e-mail and chat servers etc. to preserve the integrity of the operations of their business and make much more efficient use of their technical staff. DDoS attacks can severely compromise site performance leading to frustration in customers and users. Service-level agreements (SLAs) would be violated costing high service credits. Company reputations can sometimes be permanently harmed as well. Revenue loss, productivity loss, increased IT expenses etc. are to name a few of the losses the company would have to face. The transactional volumes of an e-commerce site, average revenue per transaction, advertisement revenue, brand equity, legal liabilities, as well as technical staff time required to restore an attacked site should all be taken into consideration when determining the financial impact of any DDoS-related downtime.
Complete DDoS Protection:
Taking on DDoS attacks means detecting the ever increasingly complex attacks along with mitigating the effects of the attack in order to help with business stability and resource accessibility.
Complete DDoS protection is shaped based on four key areas:
* Mitigation of the attack, not just detection.
* Ability to precisely differentiate good traffic from bad traffic and to help preserve business continuity.
* Inclusion of the performance and architecture to protect from all points of vulnerability.
* Maintenance of reliable and cost-efficient scalability.
A DDoS defense that has been built on these concepts to deliver an immediate response to even spoofed attacks through integrated detection and blocking mechanisms. It also helps to Identify and block individual spoofed packets in order to safeguard genuine business transactions. They also offer mechanisms to handle the huge volume of DDoS attacks and enable on-demand deployment to protect the network during attacks without introducing a point of failure or imposing the scaling costs of an inline solution. They also employ the usage of standard protocols for all communications, guaranteeing maximum interoperability and reliability.
DDoS attacks will only continue to grow in gravity, due to the numerous points of vulnerability of the Internet, and business’ increasing dependence on the Internet. Providers, enterprises, and governments must protect their investments, revenue, and services as the cost of these attacks increase. What we require in today’s world is a new type of solution that can detect the most sophisticated DDoS attacks, but also have the ability to block increasingly complex and difficult-to-detect attack traffic without influencing appropriate business transactions.
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