DDoS Security Guidelines

6 July 2021

In previous articles we have tackled the fact that the frequency of DDoS attacks is increasing all over the world. There are several explanations for this:

• the growth of online retail due to the pandemic;
• the development of DDoS technologies which significantly increased the power of attacks. Unless it is specifically secured from DDoS, no IT infrastructure has a chance to resist such an attack and remain operational.

What can you do to protect yourself from DDoS? The need for preventive measures to ensure the protection of a resource from this type of attack is becoming more urgent than ever.

5 steps to prepare for DDoS attacks

1. It is logical to assume that in order to protect against DDoS, first of all, it is necessary to minimize the vulnerabilities to provide as little information to an attacker as possible. This approach limits hackers' ability to attack and provides the ability to create a centralized defense. It is important to ensure that your service does not have any unnecessarily exposed ports and protocols.
2. Another way to protect against a DDoS attack is to filter traffic based on its content, IP addresses, and other parameters. Special hardware and software allows you to analyze all network requests to the service and filter out suspicious requests.
3. In the context of using specialized software and services for DDoS protection (offered by StormWall), it is very important to provide the defender with as much information as possible about how your service works: where requests can come from, how it works when it is fully operational. This is all necessary so that the DDoS protection software can track anomalies in the incoming traffic as quickly as possible and stop the DDoS attack in the bud.
4. Another important criterion is the ability to dynamically scale your system up. Most DDoS attacks are very resource intensive, so it is important to be able to quickly increase or decrease the amount of your computing resources. One of the solutions in this context is to deploy additional containers of your service in cloud-based on-demand instances.
5. When setting up your server and software, you need to ensure that your hosting provider provides excess bandwidth to your server to handle large volumes of traffic.

Trends

However, many experts already believe that effective protection against DDoS attacks in the future will require a fundamental change in the security paradigm. The trend of the Internet of Things and 5G networks will change the global digital landscape and will make it possible to create botnets of 100-200 thousand devices that are capable of generating attacks with a capacity of up to 1 Tbits.