How to Prevent DDoS Attack in 2019

The first known DDoS attack was carried out in the year 2000 by a 15-year-old boy named Michael Calce, according to Norton, and was used to temporarily bring down huge websites like Yahoo, CNN, and eBay, causing an error message like the image displayed above.

This brand of attack has been on the rise ever since.

Who Launches DDoS Attacks and Why?

Though DDoS attacks have grown in their power and sophistication, basic DDoS attacks can be carried out by almost anyone. Regular people can pay for DDoS attacks on a target online or on the black market. They can even rent or lease an existing botnet to carry out their malicious plans.

Early DDoS attacks, like the first one carried out by Michael Calce (aka “Mafiaboy”) was simply done for hacker bragging rights. Just because he could.

Usually though, these are the people who use DDoS attacks, and their reasons for doing so

• Business owners to get ahead of competitors
• Competitive gamers to take down opponents
• Activists to prevent people from accessing certain content
• Trolls to enact revenge on a target

Who is Most at Risk of a DDoS Attack?

The average person doesn’t have much to fear, but giant corporations are the main target. They could potentially lose millions or billions of dollars as a result of downtime caused by a DDoS attack. Smaller business owners could suffer significantly as well.

It’s important for any organization with an online presence to be fully prepared for a potential DDoS attack at any time.

How to Prevent DDoS Attacks

You can’t prevent a malicious attacker from sending waves of inauthentic traffic to your servers, but you can be prepared ahead of time to handle the load.

1. Catch it Early by Monitoring Traffic

It’s important to have a good understanding of what constitutes normal, low, and high volume traffic for your organization, according to Amazon Web Services.

If you know what to expect when your traffic hits its upper limit, you can put rate limiting into place. That means that the server will only accept as many requests as it can handle.

Having up-to-date knowledge of your traffic trends will also help you identify a problem quickly.

You should also be prepared for surges in traffic due to seasonality, marketing campaigns, and more. Lots of authentic traffic (from a viral social media link, for example) can sometimes have a similar server-crashing effect. And even though it’s from a legitimate source, downtown can still be costly for your business.

2. Get More Bandwidth

Once you have a good idea of the server capacity you need, based on your average and high traffic levels, you should get it and more. Getting more server bandwidth than you actually need is called “overprovisioning.”

This buys you more time in the case of a DDoS attack before your website, server, or application gets completely overloaded.

3. Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN)

The goal of a DDoS is to overload your hosting server. One solution, then, is to store your data on multiple servers all over the world.

That’s exactly what a Content Distribution Network does.

CDNs serve your website or data to users from a server that’s close in proximity to each user for faster performance. But using one also means that you’re less vulnerable to an attack because if one server becomes overloaded, you have many more that are still operational.

What to Do if you’ve Been Targeted by DDoS

DDoS attacks these days are so sophisticated and powerful that it can be very difficult to solve them on your own. Which is why the best line of defense against an attack will be having the right preventions in place from the start.

But if you’re under attack and your server is offline right now, there are a few things you can do:

1. Get Defensive Measures in Place Quickly

If you’ve got a good idea of what normal traffic looks like, you should be able to identify when you’re under a DDoS attack pretty rapidly.

You’ll see a massive flood of server requests or web traffic from suspicious-looking sources. But you may still have some time before your server becomes completely overwhelmed and crashes.

Set up rate limiting as soon as possible and clear your server logs to free up more space.

2. Call your Hosting Provider

If someone else owns and operates the server that serves your data, notify them of the attack right away.

They might be able to “blackhole” your traffic until the attack subsides, meaning any incoming requests to the server will simply be dropped, whether it’s legitimate or illegitimate. It will be in their interest to do this so that their other customers’ servers don’t crash either.

From there, they’ll likely reroute the traffic through a “scrubber” to filter out the illegitimate traffic and let normal requests through.

3. Call in a Specialist

If you’re under a large-scale attack or can’t afford any downtime to your website or application, you might want to consider bringing in a DDoS mitigation specialist.

What they can do is divert your traffic to their own massive servers that can handle the load and try to scrub the illegitimate requests from there.

4. Wait it Out

Hiring a professional to reroute and scrub your web traffic is costly.

Most DDoS attacks are over within a few days (though in severe cases, they can last longer), so you always have the option of simply taking the loss, and being better prepared next time.

Source:SafetyDedective