For many, their website is at the heart of their organization and absolutely vital to day-to-day operations. Being without it means loss - of opportunity, or reputation and of revenue. The worst nightmare scenario is a DDos attack. Here's some advice on how to prevent such an eventuality.

In August 2024, an Israeli financial services company suffered over three hours of downtime following an attack on its systems. The attack wasn’t caused by a sophisticated threat actor deploying ransomware, or a critical vulnerability being exploited.

Instead, it was caused by bots – many, many bots working together, in an attack model known as botnet-powered Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Indeed, DDoS has been a prominent threat for decades, and it remains a major concern for businesses worldwide.

Attackers direct botnet traffic to their desired target, which could be a server, network, or an application. The sheer volume of requests quickly overwhelms the target, causing it to either shut down completely or become so slow that it’s unusable for real users. This threat is real and only getting more dangerous, with SC Media reporting a 25% uptick in DDoS attacks in the second half of 2024. 

Luckily, there are several ways businesses can prevent DDoS attacks, and this article will show exactly how.

Map Your Infrastructure to Identify Weak Points

All security initiatives must begin by understanding the resources you need to protect, along with their risk levels and potential weaknesses. An attacker trying to DDoS your infrastructure will try to do the same, so it’s important to be first to the party.

For a DDoS attack, public-facing infrastructure like web servers, APIs, and DNS servers are the most likely to be targeted, so they should be a priority. 

Start by conducting a security audit on these components, which will tell you what measures you need to take. The most important factors for handling unexpected traffic surges include bandwidth capacity, server response times, and firewall rules. 

Additionally, you have to think about the dependencies between services to understand how an attack on one could impact others. For example, a DNS server being down will likely disrupt several dependent services, even if they aren’t directly targeted. 

Implement Network Security Services

To effectively protect these assets, you can’t just rely on configuration changes; you need ​​specialized network security services designed to detect, analyze, and mitigate DDoS attacks in real time. 

Firewalls and IPS systems are nice to have, as they can help detect potential attacks. However, these tools aren’t designed to stop massive amounts of traffic typically seen with DDoS. Instead, the most effective solution is a load balancer, a tool or service that dynamically distributes traffic across resources to minimize disruption.

When a DDoS attack generates an unusually high volume of traffic, the load balancer can redirect the malicious traffic to less critical servers, or work with backup servers to maintain availability during extreme loads.

Rate limiting is also a necessary measure, setting a threshold for how many requests a server will accept from a single IP address or over a specific time period.

Combining all of the logs from servers, firewalls, and other components into a security information and event management system (SIEM) will give security analysts a centralized view of the entire network, allowing them to gather intelligence and respond to potential threats efficiently.

Invest in a DDoS Protection Service

While manually configured load balancing and rate limiting can stop most DDoS attacks, those that involve large botnets, such as the case with the Israeli financial services company, require further protection.

A specialized DDoS protection service can prevent even the most advanced botnets from causing operational disruptions by implementing advanced routing and real-time capacity management.

It’s a great replacement to traditional load balancing and rate limiting measures, which rely on static rules and pre-configurations, becoming ineffective when attackers use more advanced techniques like randomized IP addresses or varying traffic volumes. In contrast, a DDoS protection solution utilizes machine learning and real-time traffic analysis to dynamically optimize the traffic through the most efficient paths and minimize latency even during an attack. 

Most of these services offer attractive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which typically guarantee uninterrupted uptime aside from a few seconds per month, so you can expect minimal impact to your operations if an attack occurs.

Build a Comprehensive Incident Response Plan

With the level of sophistication of modern botnets, it’s difficult to trust that your technical measures can protect you 100% of the time over the long term. The chance of an incident is always there, and you must prepare to face it with decisiveness and a real action plan, popularly known as an incident response plan.

An IR plan outlines the roles, responsibilities, and courses of action your team must take during a DDoS attack to restore normal operations as quickly as possible. 

This involves defining the tools and methods for detecting and confirming the attack, along with post-attack activities like communication protocols (both internally and externally) and recovery procedures, such as activating a backup service to maintain availability.

Conclusion

DDoS attacks are not easy to respond to, or even prepare against, as they don’t really require you to be vulnerable to specific exploits or weaknesses in your system. An attacker can decide to overwhelm you with traffic, and will quickly succeed if you don’t have any traffic management measures.

Set up a load balancer and have backup servers in place that you can quickly switch to if the main ones are overwhelmed. For complete protection from larger, modern botnets, consider investing in a DDoS protection service.

More Information

DDoS Attacks

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