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DDoS protection, mitigation and defense: 7 essential tips

Protecting your network from DDoS attacks starts with planning your response. Here, security experts offer their best advice for fighting back. DDoS attacks are bigger and more ferocious than ever and can strike anyone at any time. With that in mind we’ve assembled some essential advice for protecting against DDoS attacks. 1. Have your DDoS mitigation plan ready Organizations must try to anticipate the applications and network services adversaries will target and draft an emergency response plan to mitigate those attacks. [ Find out how DDoS attacks are evolving and bookmark CSO’s daily dashboard for the latest advisories and headlines. | Sign up for CSO newsletters. ] “Enterprises are paying more attention to these attacks and planning how they’ll respond. And they’re getting better at assembling their own internal attack information as well as the information their vendors are providing them to help fight these attacks,” says Tsantes. IBM’s Price agrees. “Organizations are getting better at response. They’re integrating their internal applications and networking teams, and they know when the attack response needs to be escalated so that they aren’t caught off guard. So as attackers are becoming much more sophisticated, so are the financial institutions,” she says. “A disaster recovery plan and tested procedures should also be in place in the event a business-impacting DDoS attack does occur, including good public messaging. Diversity of infrastructure both in type and geography can also help mitigate against DDoS as well as appropriate hybridization with public and private cloud,” says Day. “Any large enterprise should start with network level protection with multiple WAN entry points and agreements with the large traffic scrubbing providers (such as Akamai or F5) to mitigate and re-route attacks before they get to your edge. No physical DDoS devices can keep up with WAN speed attacks, so they must be first scrubbed in the cloud. Make sure that your operations staff has procedures in place to easily re-route traffic for scrubbing and also fail over network devices that get saturated,” says Scott Carlson, technical fellow at BeyondTrust. 2. Make real-time adjustments While it’s always been true that enterprises need to be able to adjust in real-time to DDoS attacks, it became increasingly so when a wave of attacks struck many in the financial services and banking industry in 2012 and 2013, including the likes of Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citibank, PNC Bank and Wells Fargo. These attacks were both relentless and sophisticated. “Not only were these attacks multi-vector, but the tactics changed in real time,” says Gary Sockrider, solutions architect for the Americas at Arbor Networks. The attackers would watch how sites responded, and when the site came back online, the hackers would adjust with new attack methods. “They are resolute and they will hit you on some different port, protocol, or from a new source. Always changing tactics,” he says. “ Enterprises have to be ready to be as quick and flexible as their adversaries.” 3. Enlist DDoS protection and mitigation services John Nye, VP of cybersecurity strategy at CynergisTek explains that there are many things enterprises can do on their own to be ready to adjust for when these attacks hit, but enlisting a third-party DDoS protection service may be the most affordable route. “Monitoring can be done within the enterprise, typically in the SOC or NOC, to watch for excessive traffic and if it is sufficiently distinguishable from legitimate traffic, then it can be blocked at the web application firewalls (WAF) or with other technical solutions. While it is possible to build a more robust infrastructure that can deal with larger traffic loads, this solution is substantially costlier than using a third-party service,” Nye says. Chris Day, chief cybersecurity officer at data center services provider Cyxtera, agrees with Nye that enterprises should consider getting specialty help. “Enterprises should work with a DDoS mitigation company and/or their network service provider to have a mitigation capability in place or at least ready to rapidly deploy in the event of an attack.” “The number one most useful thing that an enterprise can do — if their web presence is that critical to their business — is to enlist a third-party DDoS protection service,” adds Nye. “I will not recommend any particular vendor in this case, as the best choice is circumstantial and if an enterprise is considering using such a service they should thoroughly investigate the options.” 4. Don’t rely only on perimeter defenses Everyone we interviewed when reporting on the DDoS attacks that struck financial services firms a few years ago found that their traditional on-premises security devices — firewalls, intrusion-prevention systems, load balancers —were unable to block the attacks. “We watched those devices failing. The lesson there is really simple: You have to have the ability to mitigate the DDoS attacks before it gets to those devices. They’re vulnerable. They’re just as vulnerable as the servers you are trying to protect,” says Sockrider, when speaking of the attacks on banks and financial services a few years ago. Part of the mitigation effort is going to have to rely on upstream network providers or managed security service providers that can interrupt attacks away from the network perimeter. It’s especially important to mitigate attacks further upstream when you’re facing high-volume attacks. “If your internet connection is 10GB and you receive a 100GB attack, trying to fight that at the 10GB mark is hopeless. You’ve already been slaughtered upstream,” says Sockrider. 5. Fight application-layer attacks in-line Attacks on specific applications are generally stealthy, much lower volume and more targeted. “They’re designed to fly under the radar so you need the protection on-premises or in the data center so that you can perform deep-packet inspection and see everything at the application layer. This is the best way to mitigate these kinds of attacks,” says Sockrider. “Organizations will need a web protection tool that can handle application layer DoS attacks,” adds Tyler Shields, VP of Strategy, Marketing & Partnerships at Signal Sciences. “Specifically, those that allow you to configure it to meet your business logic. Network based mitigations are no longer going to suffice,” he says. Amir Jerbi, co-founder and CTO is Aqua Security, a container security company, explains how one of the steps you can take to protect against DDoS attacks is to add redundancy to an application by deploying it on multiple public cloud providers. “This will ensure that if your application or infrastructure provider is being attacked then you can easily scale out to the next cloud deployment,” he says. 6. Collaborate The banking industry is collaborating a little when it comes to these attacks. Everything they reveal is carefully protected and shared strictly amongst themselves, but in a limited way, banks are doing a better job at collaborating than most industries . “They’re working among each other and with their telecommunication providers. And they’re working directly with their service providers. They have to. They can’t just work and succeed in isolation,” says Lynn Price, IBM security strategist for the financial sector. For example, when the financial services industry was targeted, they turned to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center for support and to share information about threats. “In some of these information-sharing meetings, the [big] banks are very open when it comes to talking about the types of attacks underway and the solutions they put into place that proved effective. In that way, the large banks have at least been talking with each other,” says Rich Bolstridge, chief strategist of financial services at Akamai Technologies. The financial sector’s strategy is one that could and should be adopted elsewhere, regardless of industry. 7. Watch out for secondary attacks As costly as DDoS attacks can be, they may sometimes be little more than a distraction to provide cover for an even more nefarious attack. “DDoS can be a diversion tactic for more serious attacks coming in from another direction. Banks need to be aware that they have to not only be monitoring for and defending the DDoS attack, but they also have to have an eye on the notion that the DDoS may only be one aspect of a multifaceted attack, perhaps to steal account or other sensitive information,” Price says. 8. Stay vigilant Although many times DDoS attacks appear to only target high profile industries and companies, research shows that’s just not accurate. With today’s interconnected digital supply-chains (every enterprise is dependent on dozens if not hundreds of suppliers online), increased online activism expressed through attacks, state sponsored attacks on industries in other nations, and the ease of which DDoS attacks can be initiated, every organization must consider themselves a target. So be ready, and use the advice in this article as a launching point to build your organization’s own anti-DDoS strategy. Source: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2133613/network-security/malware-cybercrime-ddos-protection-mitigation-and-defense-7-essential-tips.html

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DDoS protection, mitigation and defense: 7 essential tips

DOSarrest Rolls Out all New DDoS Protection Software

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 11, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — DOSarrest Internet Security announced today that they have released their new DDoS protection software, along with a number of other advances and upgrades. This is DOSarrest’s 5th major release since starting in the fully managed cloud based DDoS protection service in 2007. This latest release is a complete rewrite of DOSarrest’s front end and backend systems utilizing the latest software development tools and technologies. Some of the new enhancements include. All new customer facing portal with 15 real-time, interactive traffic statistics displays. Complete new back end with new security features that can be deployed live in seconds All new big data analytics engine for faster real-time and historical statistics displays Machine learning module for traffic anomaly and bot detection All new larger routers and increased upstream capacity in all global locations Mark Teolis, CEO at DOSarrest, explains, “We are in our 11th year of providing a fully managed cloud based DDoS protection service, and if there’s one thing we have learned it’s that you’d better be ahead of the bad actors. This new release was developed with extreme flexibility in mind; we can basically analyze and create a feature that will stop any sophisticated attacks not yet even seen in the wild.” Teolis adds, “The biggest misconception in the DDoS protection world is that you only need capacity to fend off DDoS attacks, but in reality your chance of being hit by a small 10Mb/sec attack that will take your site down is millions of times greater.” About DOSarrest Internet Security: DOSarrest founded in 2007 in Vancouver, B.C., Canada is one of only a couple of companies worldwide to specialize in only cloud based DDoS protection services. Additional Web security services offered are Cloud based W eb A pplication F irewall (WAF) , V ulnerability T esting and O ptimization (VTO) , DataCenter Defender-GRE as well as cloud based global load balancing . Source: https://www.dosarrest.com/news-and-events/dosarrest-rolls-out-all-new-ddos-protection-software/

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DOSarrest Rolls Out all New DDoS Protection Software

Sharing is caring, but keep your botnets to yourself

Sharing economy apps are prime targets for malicious attacks. The boom of mobile applications has superseded traditional services, revolutionising customer experience as we know it. In Australia, peer-to-peer services are being embraced by millions of consumers. A 2017 report by RateSetter revealed, 65% of Australians used sharing economy services like Uber and Airbnb in the past 6 months, with that set to increase to 75% in the next six months. With users willing to share personal details and financial information for the benefit of convenience or speed, these apps themselves are now a prime target for malicious attacks. These attacks paralyse services potentially for ransom, or worse, to unleash or amplify Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks to exploit users’ data. The very nature of DDoS attacks are changing to reflect the app boom. Old fashioned ‘network-layer’ DDoS attacks (the big bandwidth volumetric ones we read about) are being overtaken by smarter ‘application-layer’ attacks which interject the good application requests with the bad, harder to identify ones. As sharing economy apps become prime targets for malicious attacks, so do the services they connect to – and digital transformation means that many of those services are now in the cloud, or were born there natively. Big brands that have a huge amount of consumer data like Airbnb or Uber are moving quickly to the cloud. Airbnb migrated almost all of its cloud computing functions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) only after a year of starting and Uber has been in talks with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. The underlying danger of DDoS According to Neustar’s 2017 ‘Worldwide DDoS Attacks and Cyber Insights Research Report’, 84% of organisations surveyed globally were hit by a DDoS attack in the last 12 months, and 86% of these organisations were hit multiple times. Within the broader spectrum of risks for corporate security and IT decision makers, DDoS attacks present a growing challenge for several reasons. Firstly, the number of vulnerable devices has dramatically increased and so too has the level to which DDoS attacks have become automated and commoditised. Where a connection to the Internet previously required something that was more traditionally like a computer, IoT and cloud convergence have enabled even light bulbs to be connected to a network – providing an increased number of sources generating traffic. Secondly, according to Telstra’s 2017 cybersecurity report, 59% of Australian businesses experienced a DDoS attack on at least a yearly basis, with only 36% reporting a recovery time of within 30 minutes – and that’s a potential 30 minutes of app downtime in an economy where the patience of web and mobile users is measured in seconds. Security must be embedded in company culture Large scale DDoS attacks, like the Mirai botnet, gained significant media coverage after successfully impacting sites and services like Amazon, PayPal, Reddit and Twitter. If DDoS can disrupt giants like Amazon, then sharing economy apps like GoGet and Airtasker can become prime targets too, resulting in loss of revenue or customer loyalty. Organisations should strengthen their stance against all types of attacks and invest in smarter cyber security solutions. An important first step should be to cultivate a culture of cyber security awareness to create on-going conversations across all business units and functions. Anyone who has low awareness of cyber security and does not embrace good digital hygiene can be a weak link. Most importantly, security assessments must be an integral part of the application development framework, not an afterthought. Having securely coded applications will not only protect critical data at source, but will also enhance customer experiences and their confidence in an organisation. Ultimately, these simple yet effective measures integrated into every aspect of the organisation will ensure that customer trust is retained and the organisation’s bottom line is protected. Whilst the sharing economy is a prime target for attacks, with well-designed security infrastructure and best practices in place, we can be confident that it will continue to thrive and users’ personal data will remain secure. Source: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/627122/sharing-caring-keep-your-botnets-yourself/?

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Sharing is caring, but keep your botnets to yourself

Machine Learning in the DOSarrest Operations

Machine Learning can appear in many different forms and guises, but a general definition of Machine Learning usually incorporates something about computers learning without explicit programming and being able to automatically adapt. And while Machine Learning has been around for decades as a concept, it’s become more of a reality as computational power continues to increase, and the proliferation of Big Data platforms making it easier to capture floods of data. These developments have made ML practical and garnered a lot of interest, as evidenced by the large number of articles in the last two years surrounding AI and machine Learning However despite all this, the adoption of this Machine Learning is still relatively low amongst companies in the tech landscape (Gartner estimating that fewer than 15 percent of enterprises successfully get machine learning into production). And even when you hear about Company X adopting a machine learning strategy, it’s often conflated with another strategy or service within that company, and not truly realizing the automated ‘adaptiveness’ inherent within ML. Those companies that do realize a proper machine learning strategy, understanding and grooming their data as well as identifying the appropriate model/s can see real benefits to their operations, which is why DOSarrest has been developing such a strategy over the last year. Here at DOSarrest, we’ve been focusing on building an Anomaly Detection engine, focusing on the constantly evolving sophisticated application layer attacks. We collect huge amounts of data from disparate sources (e.g. Customized web logs, snmp and flow data, IDS logs, etc.), even when customers are not under attack. This provides an opportunity to identify baselines even in a multi tenant environment. As you would expect, there is a high degree of cardinality within some of the data fields, which can be challenging to work with when working with data in motion, but can have great benefits. With these huge structured data sets, we are able to identify KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and statistics that can be leveraged by the engine to identify anomalous behavior and brought to the attention of the Security Ops team, who are then able to investigate and act on the identified pattern. The engine continues to refine the probability of a metric, becoming more accurate over time in determining the severity of an anomaly. The strategy holds great promise, and further developments and refinements to this model will continue to evolve the best Security Operations Center in the business. A more detailed view of an anomaly – this shows a single IP requesting more than 60 times more frequently than a normal visitor. This screen gives an overview of any anomalies, organized by relevant factors. In this case the remote IP address of the requestor. Jag Bains CTO, DOSarrest Internet Security Source: https://www.dosarrest.com/ddos-blog/machine-learning-in-the-dosarrest-operations

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Machine Learning in the DOSarrest Operations

#CLOUDSEC2017: DDoS: Large Attacks Shake the Internet but Modest Attacks Cause More Business Damage

Speaking at CLOUDSEC 2017 today Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero, explored innovation in DDoS mitigation and ways to defeat the modern day DDoS attack. Stephenson said that whilst, in the last five years, there have been various large-scale DDoS attacks that have made national or even global headline news, these are not good examples of the types of attacks that companies are suffering from day-to-day. Instead, he explained that it is the frequent, modestly sized, short duration modern DDoS attacks that are the real problem as they actually cause organizations the most damage regularly, and it’s those types of attacks that businesses should be focusing on. “The headline-grabbing attacks aren’t always the ones that you really have to worry about with regards to improving your security posture for your business,” Stephenson argued. “Those high-profile attacks are really just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more activity that ends up in real terms doing more harm to businesses below the waterline. If you’re not doing something today to protect your business against these types of threats, then you are exposed.” The reality is, he added, protecting against the everyday types of attacks is something you can do a lot about and you can inform yourselves much more clearly about the consequences and the types of vectors being used through the use of good technology products that are aimed at DDoS specifically. “The very large, internet-overpowering events that occur might make the internet itself creak in certain geographies or services, but there’s very little you can do as an individual corporation to deal with those issues,” Stephenson concluded. Source: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/cloudsec2017-ddos-large-attacks/

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#CLOUDSEC2017: DDoS: Large Attacks Shake the Internet but Modest Attacks Cause More Business Damage

America’s Cardroom, WPN Hit by DDoS Attack Again

It had been a while, but America’s Cardroom seemed due for another cyber attack. Yup, leading into the Labor Day weekend, ACR and its network, the Winning Poker Network, were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, something that is unfortunately not a unique event for either the online poker room or the network. The attack began Thursday evening, affecting, among many other games, ACR’s Online Super Series (OSS) Cub3d. Problems continued all the way through Saturday. America’s Cardroom initially tweeted about the issues at about quarter after eight Thursday night, writing, “We are currently experiencing a DDOS attack, all running tournaments have been paused. Will keep you updated.” A half hour later, ACR announced that it was cancelling all tournaments in progress and providing refunds per the site’s terms and conditions. At about 9:00pm, the site was back up, but the DDoS attacks continued, causing poker client interruptions less than two and a half hours later. Problems continued well into Friday morning until ACR and WPN finally got things under control (temporarily) close to noon. The pattern continued that evening, with games going down after 6:00pm Friday and then resuming, and going down again after 7:00pm. Finally, around noon Saturday, ACR’s techs seemed to get a handle on things “for good.” In a Distributed Denial of Service attack, the attacker (or attackers) floods a server with millions of communications requests at once. It’s not a virus or a hack or anything malicious like that, but the communications overwhelm the server and grind it to a halt. Think of it like the traffic jam to end all traffic jams. It wouldn’t be THAT big of a deal if the attack was coming from one source, but since it is “distributed,” the attacker arranges it so that it originates from literally millions of IP addresses. It makes defending one’s network insanely difficult. To use another brilliant illustration, if you are trapped in a house and a zombie horde is coming for your juicy brains, it’s scary and awful, but if all the zombies decide to come in through the front door, you can probably handle it if properly equipped. If they surround you and just crash in through every door, window, and mouse hole like in Night of the Living Dead, might as well develop a taste for human flesh because you’re screwed. As with other DDoS attacks, the network was contacted by the aggressor, who demanded a ransom of some sort. WPN CEO Phil Nagy went on Twitch and said he refused to cave to any demands. He even posted a brief series of messages from the attacker, who said he was doing it on behalf of a competing poker room (all spelling mistakes what-not his): this is my job anouther site give me money for doos you and i ddos you this is my job Nagy said that he hoped that by at least making it public that it may be another site responsible for the DDoS attack that it will make someone nervous that they could get caught and the attacks will subside. WPN first experienced a major DDoS attack in December 2014, during its Million Dollar Sunday tournament, when it caused disconnections, lag, and registration problems. It happened again in September 2015 and again in October 2015. The network will be re-running many of the tournaments, including the OSS and MOSS, and will cut the buy-in of the million dollar guaranteed OSS tourney in half as well as add an extra Sunday Million. Source: https://www.pokernewsdaily.com/americas-cardroom-wpn-hit-ddos-attack-30342/

Week in review: Cyber threat hunting, Android DDoS botnet, drone bug bounty

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, podcasts and articles: New, custom ransomware delivered to orgs via extremely targeted emails Ransomware campaigns are usually wide-flung affairs: the attackers send out as many malicious emails as possible and hope to hit a substantial number of targets. But more targeted campaigns are also becoming a trend. Getting a start on cyber threat hunting We live in a world where the adversaries will persist … More ?

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Week in review: Cyber threat hunting, Android DDoS botnet, drone bug bounty

Google pulls 300 Android apps used for DDoS attacks

A number of security researchers teamed up to fight the WireX botnet. If a random storage manager or video player you downloaded recently has disappeared from your Android device, don’t worry: it might have been for your own good. Google has removed 300 apps from the Play store, which were apparently merely masquerading as legitimate applications. In truth, they were made to hi-jack your phone so it can be used as part of a botnet’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. WireX, as the botnet is called, pummeled several content providers and delivery networks with traffic from the devices it hi-jacked on August 17th, though it’s been active since around August 2nd. In some cases, it also acted as a ransomware, demanding money from its victim. It was content delivery network Akamai that discovered its existence following an assault on one of its clients. The company then got together with Google and several security researchers from rival companies like Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Oracle + Dyn, RiskIQ, Team Cymru and other organizations to solve the issue. Upon learning that the Play Store is inundated with hundreds of fake WireX apps hiding behind the guise of innocuous programs like storage managers and ringtones, the big G did its part and blocked them all. Here are a few samples of infected apps: In a statement, Mountain View said it’s now also in the process of removing applications from affected devices. It’s unclear how long that would take, though, since based on the team’s research, WireX compromised over 70,000 devices from over 100 countries. Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/29/google-pulls-300-android-apps-wirex-ddos/

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Critical infrastructure not ready for DDoS attacks: FOI data report

The UK’s critical infrastructure is vulnerable to DDoS attacks due to failure to carry out basic security defence work – 39 percent of respondents to a recent survey had not completed the government’s ’10 Steps to Cyber Security’ programme, which was first issued in 2012. New data was obtained by Corero Network Security under the Freedom of Information Act surveying 338 critical infrastructure organisations in the UK, including fire and rescue services, police forces, ambulance trusts, NHS trusts, energy suppliers and transport organisations; it also showed that 42 percent of NHS Trusts had not completed the programme. More than half (51 percent) of these critical infrastructure organisations were described by Corero as ignoring the risk of short, stealth DDoS attacks on their networks – which typically account for around 90 percent of DDoS attacks and are used by attackers to plant malware or ransomware, or engage in data theft. Corero reports that these stealth attacks are typically less than 30 minutes in duration, and 98 percent of those stopped by the company were less than 10Gbps in volume, hence they often go unnoticed by security staff, but are frequently used by attackers in their efforts to target, map and infiltrate a network. In a statement issued today, Sean Newman, director of product panagement at Corero, comments: “Cyber-attacks against national infrastructure have the potential to inflict significant, real-life disruption and prevent access to critical services that are vital to the functioning of our economy and society. These findings suggest that many such organisations are not as cyber resilient as they should be, in the face of growing and sophisticated cyber threats.” Newman adds, “ By not detecting and investigating these short, surgical, DDoS attacks on their networks, infrastructure organisations could also be leaving their doors wide-open for malware or ransomware attacks, data theft or more serious cyber attacks.” It was also pointed out that in the event of a breach, these organisations could be liable for fines of up to £17 million, or four percent of global turnover, under the UK government’s proposals to implement the EU’s Network and Information Systems (NIS) directive, from May 2018. In an email to SC, David Emm, principal security researcher, Kaspersky Lab observed, “The world isn’t ready for cyber -threats against critical infrastructure – but criminals are clearly ready and able to launch attacks on these facilities. We’ve seen attempts on power grids, oil refineries, steel plants, financial infrastructure, seaports and hospitals – and these are cases where organisations have spotted attacks and acknowledged them. However, many more companies do neither, and the lack of reporting these incidents hampers risk assessment and response to the threat.” Edgard Capdevielle, CEO of Nozomi Networks, also emailed SC to comment: “This report emphasises the impact of DDoS attacks and how they are often used as a cover to distract security teams while infecting systems with malware or stealing data. Such initiatives are often the first step in “low and slow” attacks that provide the perpetrators with the information and access they need to carry out system disruptions. Examples of this are the Ukraine power outages of 2015 and 2016, both of which involved cyber-attacks which persisted for many months before culminating in shutdowns. “In light of this information, CNI organisations should give a high priority to re-assessing their cyber-security programmes, evaluate where they are in relation to government recommendations, and inform themselves about current technologies available for protection….The right approach is to both shore up defenses and be able to quickly respond when attacks do occur.” Previously, when talking about the new UK legislation targetting CNI, Eldon Sprickerhoff, founder and chief security strategist at eSentire commented in an email to SC, “Although cyber-security regulations will require significant effort for the companies that are affected, this new legislation by the UK government demonstrates that they understand the severity of cyber-threats in today’s digital world and the destruction they can cause, if undeterred. Even if you’re not a CNI, cyber-threats should concern you. With cyber-criminals constantly adjusting their tactics, it is imperative that companies never stop defending themselves by constantly improving and expanding their cyber-security practices. Managed detection and response and incident response planning are common ways companies can stay ahead of their attackers.” Sprickerhoff recommended the same measures be taken by CNI organisations to improve cyber-security as for other enterprises, namely: Encryption – store sensitive data that is only readable with a digital key Integrity checks – regularly check for any changes to system files Network monitoring – use tools to help you detect for suspicious behaviour Penetration testing – conduct controlled cyber-attacks on systems to test their defences and identify vulnerabilities Education – train your employees in cyber-security awareness and tightly manage access to any confidential information Source: https://www.scmagazineuk.com/critical-infrastructure-not-ready-for-ddos-attacks-foi-data-report/article/684838/

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Critical infrastructure not ready for DDoS attacks: FOI data report

3 Ways to Defeat DDoS Attacks

In 2012, a number of DDoS attacks hit Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and PNC Bank. These attacks have since spread across most industries from government agencies to local schools and are showing an almost yearly evolution, with the most recent focus being the Internet of Things (IoT). In 2016, compromised cameras, printers, DVRs and other IoT appliances were used in a large attack on Dyn that took down major websites including Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Etsy and Spotify. Inside Distributed Denial-of-Service Threats Although these large attacks dominate the headlines, they’re not what most enterprises will deal with day to day. The most common attacks are in the range of 20 to 30 Gbps or less, while larger attacks have been reported at 1.2 tbps. Creating DDoS Defense Security technology is becoming more sophisticated, but so are hackers, which means attacks can be much more difficult to mitigate now than in the past. Enterprises must be knowledgeable and prepared with mitigation techniques as the attacks continue to evolve. DDoS mitigation comes in three models: Scrubbing Centers The most common DDoS mitigation option for enterprises is to buy access to a scrubbing center service. During an attack, traffic is redirected to the security provider’s network, where the bad traffic is “scrubbed out” and only good traffic is returned to the customer. This option is good for multi-ISP environments and can be used to counter both volumetric and application-based attacks. For added protection, some providers can actually place a device in your data center, but this is not as cost-effective as the cloud-based option. ISP- Clean Pipes Approach With the rise of DDoS attacks, many ISPs have started their own scrubbing centers internally, and for a premium will monitor and mitigate attacks on their customers’ websites. In this scenario, ISPs operate as a one-stop-shop for bandwidth, hosting and DDoS mitigation. But some ISPs are more experienced at this than others, so customers must be sure to thoroughly test and research the quality of the service offered by their ISPs. Content Delivery Network Approach The distributed nature of content delivery networks (CDNs) means that websites live globally on multiple servers versus one origin server, making them difficult to take down. Large CDNs may have over 100,000 servers distributing or caching web content all over the world. However, CDN-based mitigation is really only a good option for enterprises that require core CDN functionality, as porting content to a CDN can be a time-intensive project. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gartnergroup/2017/08/28/3-ways-to-defeat-ddos-attacks/#dda62aada78f

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3 Ways to Defeat DDoS Attacks