Yes, here we go again. It’s another story of the never-ending, tit-for-tat world of network security. A tale of the bad guys getting smarter, and security service providers playing catchup. However, the good news is, security professionals are getting more ingenious in their attack mitigation efforts.
Now, it’s possible for security software and service providers to halt a DDoS attack, not in days or hours—but rather in seconds. By discovering attacks and stopping them before they can do damage, rapid DDoS mitigation (RDM) is just the ticket for cutting downtime-related costs.
Why zero-time mitigation matters
As the power, volume, variety, and total costs of DDoS attacks go up, so does the need for rapid DDoS mitigation. That’s because encrypted internet traffic now accounts for more than half of global website traffic.
Wait! Isn’t that welcome news? Well, yes, but encrypted service requests require many times more server resources than a regular one. It takes less attack traffic than ever to overrun a website with encrypted traffic.
Even a brief DDoS attack can end up costing your organization lost revenue, productivity, and damage to your brand. The bill for a successful 60-minute DDoS attack can total from $20,000 to $100,000. And, that doesn’t include the loss of customer trust that you take security seriously.
Because recovery time usually exceeds downtime, even short periods of inactivity can spell disaster for many online service providers. Avoiding DDoS attacks or keeping them very, very brief will help your organization avoid most or all downtime-related costs.
Types of DDoS attacks
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are cyberassaults designed to overrun a network with remotely controlled, malware-infected devices. These attacks can overwhelm a network (network-layer attacks) or server-side resources (application-layer attacks). Either way, the site or service is unable to serve legitimate users.
There are many types of DDoS attacks, which you can group into these categories:
- Volume-based attacks, which overwhelm the bandwidth of the attacked site. A new and potent variation of this exploit is the pulse-wave attack. Its series of high-energy pulses rapidly penetrates an organization’s security perimeter and causes a series of short-lived downtimes.
- Protocol attacks, which consume the resources of servers, firewalls, load balancers, or other intermediate communication equipment.
- Application layer attacks, which make seemingly legitimate requests but are designed to crash the web server. These exploits now represent almost two-thirds of all attacks.
Successful DDoS mitigation neutralizes all three types of attacks.
Time to mitigation: neutralizing attacks within seconds
When we talk about mitigation, what do we mean? Simply put, it’s a process that detects and stops an attack and cleans up malicious data on the network data stream. This process involves three steps:
- Detection– The method, in which a mitigation service notices that a DDoS attack is taking place.
- Sampling– The process that analyzes traffic flows and creates instructions for scrubbing.
- Scrubbing– The method of blocking malicious traffic identified during sampling.
Time to mitigation is the elapsed time between the first DDoS attack packet that hits your network and the beginning of the scrubbing step.
Ideally, a DDoS protection solution stops an attack before it causes any downtime. This performance standard requires immediate detection and analysis of attack traffic, creation of scrubbing instructions in several milliseconds, and an instant response to those instructions.
Rapid DDoS mitigation approaches
Just as there are many types of DDoS attacks, there are different approaches to stopping them. Currently, commercially available DDoS mitigation options include:
- Standalone, on-premises appliances.
- Hybrid solutions that combine appliances and DDoS protection services in the cloud.
- Attack mitigation as a cloud-based service.
Successful RDM requires high-speed, high-volume processing capabilities as well as the ability to exchange network traffic and attack information in real time.
Traditional DDoS attack mitigation includes rate limitation and manual signatures. This approach works well only in situations that experience few false positives. However, more advanced approaches use machine learning algorithms in a variety of data detection, description, and mitigation methods.
Machine learning (a branch of artificial intelligence) enables cybersecurity teams to monitor enormous volumes of network traffic and establish a baseline of network characteristics and behavior. When compared with real-time network traffic, the baseline data enables automated attack defense software to flag suspicious activity. These methods are part of a mitigation process, which includes:
- Creating a profile of normal traffic and detecting differences from normal network behavior.
- Describing DDoS attack traffic and creating an initial attack signature.
- Automatically updating the signature with additional traffic data and removing false positives.
- Identifying the end of the attack to stop the mitigation process.
Currently, the most advanced solution offers a 10-second TTM that’s reliable enough to be added to service-level agreements (SLAs)Delay can damage your reputation and bottom line
We all know that the bad guys won’t slow down with DDoS attacks any time soon. Now, however, IT security providers can give you the tools or services you need to minimize DDoS-related downtime and its costs. There’s no need to wait until you suffer damage. Fast, reliable mitigation capabilities are available, so consider using rapid DDoS mitigation tactics now.