DDoS Testing: Top Five Questions Answered

Security specialists have never placed DDoS testing high on the IT agenda, choosing between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. However, things change. According to a Nexus Guard Threat Report, DDoS attack frequency increased 380% in Q1 2017.

What is DDoS testing?

DDoS stands for "Distributed Denial of Service. " A DDoS attack is an attempt to render a web based service not available by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple allocated sources. So, DDoS testing is a legitimate way to inspect the target network's defense posture against such attacks via DDoS simulation.

Who needs DDoS testing most?

The need for DDoS testing depends seriously about how much your business relies on the online systems. If your organization must maintain 24/7 online existence, this type of security assessment is essential. The particular number of such businesses continues to mount up, as, according to Google 97% of consumers search for local businesses on the internet. Evidently, companies will ton the providers details security services with DDoS testing requests.

Why perform DDoS testing?

What might eventually an online business if DDoS testing is not an item on the IT budget? When an genuine attack happens, the organization will have to modify DDoS mitigation systems in an emergency mode. At best, they will cope with the attack within minutes, although it still will lead to lost revenues. At worst, the DDoS assault will lead to substantial downtime and the reduction of business opportunities.

Back in the 1990s, DDoS episodes in tended merely to reduce off of the availability of an IT system or service. Today, DDoS has become a part of an APT (Advanced persistent threat). Hackers employ a fantastic combo of client-side uses and DDoS attacks to penetrate networks and steal data. Each uses a DDoS attack as a distraction, as it happened to Fiat in May 2011.

Whilst the company was trying to mitigate the consequences of a DDoS attack, it failed to discover the theft of more than 100 million customer records. An identical case happened to TalkTalk, a UK Telecommunications company. In October 2015, you’re able to send share price gone down by 22% within a week.

This type of drastic fall was the result of a cyberattack involving a theft of customer account information with a simultaneous DDoS strike on TalkTalk's network services. The two companies experienced financial, as well as reputational losses, which could have been minimized if they had scheduled schedule DDoS testing.

Due to the use of DDoS techniques in APT episodes, security experts advise merging penetration testing with DDoS testing. Penetration testing shows whether an attacker can exploit your network to gain access to the data. DDoS testing, in its turn, aims to render your network systems unavailable and check how much workload they can handle.

Both types of security testing can be performed independently or simultaneously (as it is described in this case study, where penetration testing techniques are coupled with attacks on a DNS server). In the latter case, penetration testing engineers may replicate an APT attack using a DDoS attack as a distraction.

How is DDoS testing performed?

The very process of penetration screening can be broken into 3 stages: planning, managed DDoS attacking, and reporting.

1. Planning

The purpose of this stage is to schedule the test, introduce a DDoS testing vendor to the structure of the customer's network, define the targets and clear out all technical issues.

2. Attacking

A DDoS attack may target DNS servers, application servers, routers, firewalls and internet bandwidth. DDoS testing engineers use a matched group of botnets sending traffic to the target to take the system down.

ETHICAL HACKING TRAINING - RESOURCES (INFOSEC)

Typically, DDoS testing lasts up to 90 minutes, which, of course, can vary, with respect to the size of the network and other limitations. This specific time usually is enough to perform the checks.

DDoS testing combines the attacks of different power levels: low, medium and high. The intensity can be measured in pps (packets per second) or bps (bits per second)

Low-intensity attacks are designed to check if network monitoring systems can find abnormal traffic patterns. Mid-intensity attacks demonstrate how the network's resources are taken with the intensity increase. High-intensity attacks are designed to find vulnerable devices and applications in the customer's network and estimate the exact size of a trigger to render the network inoperable.

3. Confirming

In the final stage of DDoS testing, the customer gets a report that describes the overall effectiveness of the existing DDoS mitigation measures, discovered vulnerabilities, and tips how to plot them.

What can go wrong with DDoS tests?

Before the test, companies should pay attention to the following issues that may land them in legal hot water.

I work as a Senior Testing Specialist at TestingXperts. I handled day-to-day operations for all aspects of software testing. With over 7 yrs of professional experience I know how to build strong connection.