DDoS Attacks Mitigation to Protect Your Network and Keep Your Websites Always Available

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a malicious attempt to impact the availability of a targeted system, such as a website or an application, to legitimate end users. DDoS attack is done to slow down or crash the system with a sudden spike in fake traffic, packets, and connection requests. It is done by generating a large volume of packets or requests with an aim to overwhelm the target system. The attackers use multiple compromised or controlled sources to generate attacks, and overload resources. Too much traffic stops the system from processing genuine user requests, thus prolonging downtime, and resulting in dissatisfied customers, and lost revenue.

A botnet is typically used to cause a DDoS attack, which is a linked network of malware-infected computers, mobile devices, and IoT gadgets. DDoS attackers mostly target online retailers, financial and fintech companies, government entities, and gaming companies, to disrupt services, and inflict brand damage. While it is not directly a data breach or leakage, the affected business will have to spend time and money in getting the services back online to their pre-attack level.

High level of network security

High level of network security is required for preventing DDoS. Akamai provides in-depth DDoS defense through a transparent mesh of dedicated edge, distributed DNS, and cloud scrubbing defense. These purpose-built cloud services are designed to strengthen DDoS security postures while reducing attack surfaces, improving the quality of mitigation, and reducing false positives. All network-layer DDoS attacks are instantly dropped at the edge with zero-second SLA. The solution can be fine-tuned to the specific requirements of a business’s web applications and internet-based services.

Adopting Cloud DDoS protection is best

As businesses across all industries are accelerating their migration to the cloud, security teams remain challenged with ensuring consistent controls spanning hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Applications are deployed across multiple back-end cloud infrastructures and are becoming more difficult to protect and many organizations desire a single control point to orchestrate defenses.

With the security technology stack growing more complex, many also desire this single pane of glass — not only for optimized visibility, but also for streamlined reporting that can be fed via APIs into event data correlation systems. In order to solve this problem, organizations are turning to cloud-based DDoS security providers that can enable, not inhibit, their hybrid cloud migration strategies. it will provide scalable, responsive DDoS defenses regardless of where enterprise services may reside and help mitigate any type of DDoS attack. This would also provide proactive monitoring with a dedicated and knowledgeable security team as well as benefiting from a pay as you go subscription based model

Reduce the surface area exposed to attacks

By reducing the surface area that is exposed to attackers, you can minimize options for the attackers to orchestrate DDoS attacks. An effective DDoS attack prevention strategy would be to protect your critical assets, applications, and other resources and entry points from direct exposure to the attackers. This can be done by onboarding a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service coupled with WAF placed on the network edge. This will restrict direct access to your server applications and resources.

Black hole routing

Black hole routing is another DDoS attack mitigation strategy employed by the networks wherein malicious traffic is routed to a null route or black hole, to be dropped from the network. Based on the pattern, the packets can be filtered and routed to the black hole.

DDos attacks mitigation strategy

Without the right defenses, even a robust, modern network would likely collapse under an assault of high magnitude, making any online business inaccessible and jeopardizing consumer trust, and thus resulting in financial losses. For DDoS attacks mitigation, Akamai Prolexic has employed its industry-leading combination of technology, people and processes to pre-mitigate the assault with no collateral damage. For mitigating DDoS risk, an enterprise should deploy DDoS security risk controls in an "always on"

mitigation posture as a first layer of defense. If an attack does happen, the crisis response team should be pulled together to ensure that runbooks and incident response plans are up-to-date.

A step-by-step approach should be taken for DDoS attack mitigation, the first step being detecting an attack. It is important to identify the legitimate and malicious traffic because if you accidentally drop potential customer traffic, it would be disastrous. Response should be provided to the attack so that it does not exhaust your server. Next step is intelligent routing wherein you can break the remaining traffic into manageable chunks. The last step of DDoS attack mitigation is to look for patterns and analyse them to further strengthen your strategy.

Build a robust DDoS attack prevention and an incident response plan

It is also crucial to build robust DDoS attack prevention and an incident response plan. Your security must be holistic to provide you with always-on protection. It should be custom designed to provide access only to the certified security experts who can continuously tune it to keep your websites and applications always available to the users.

Through a combination of on-demand and always-on DDoS attack mitigation and DDoS attack prevention solutions, Akamai’s global network offers cost-effective and comprehensive DDoS attack prevention solutions to protect you from any type of DDoS attacks.

End to End DDoS protection with Akamai

Just as organizations need an end-to-end cloud strategy, they also need to consider end-to-end DDoS protection. By taking a holistic approach, Akamai acts as a first line of defense, providing protection with dedicated edge, distributed DNS, and cloud mitigation strategies designed to prevent collateral damage and single points of failure. As opposed to other cloud security provider architectures — built as an "all in one" solution — Akamai’s purpose-built DDoS clouds offer increased resiliency, dedicated scrubbing capacity, and higher quality of mitigation, finetuned to the specific requirements of web applications or internet-based services.

This combines Akamai’s leading Edge CDN delivering and accelerating only legitimate web traffic using HTTP and HTTPs protocols, Akamai DNS service to provide resilience against DDoS attacks and the cloud scrubbing defense that protects entire data centers and internet-facing infrastructure from DDoS attacks across all ports and protocols.

Akamai has architected DDoS mitigation with the highest capacity, utmost resiliency, and fastest mitigation in mind. We have mitigated some of the largest DDoS attacks launched in the world. Our proactive mitigation controls enable true zero-second mitigation, an industry-leading SLA. And we can provide DDoS protection services for multiple clients and fight multiple DDoS attacks at once.

Akamai powers and protects life online. With the most distributed compute platform — cloud to edge — customers can build modern apps while keeping experiences closer to users and threats farther away.