What is DDos Mitigation?

December 11, 2024
blog

By understanding the behavior patterns of a DDoS attack, mitigation services can effectively block or divert the malicious traffic before it overwhelms the target network. This ensures that the website is able to stay online and remains accessible to legitimate users, even under a massive influx of connection requests. This comprehensive guide takes an in-depth look at DDoS mitigation, exploring what it is, and the methods and technologies that safeguard businesses against these cyber threats.

What is DDos Mitigation?

DDoS Mitigation refers to a cybersecurity process that protects a targeted server or network from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. When a DDos attack occurs, it overwhelms the server with false requests. This leads to the server becoming unable to respond to legitimate requests.

Additionally, a DDoS attack will typically go through several phases, such as reconnaissance, botnet recruitment, attack preparation, attack execution, and attack aftermath. For a targeted server to counteract these attacks, businesses need to leverage specialized network hardware or cloud-based protection services. So what are the stages of DDoS Mitigation?

DDoS Mitigation Stages

The four stages of DDoS Mitigation are detection, response, filtering, and analysis.

Detection

To prevent a distributed attack, businesses need to detect attacks at the earliest possible stage. A potential DDoS attack can even occur from slight irregularities in site traffic. However, human detection is not always accurate in catching unusual behaviors from servers or networks.

To detect unusual network behaviors, businesses are adopting user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). With UEBA tools, it identifies unusual behavior not only in users but also in the routers, servers, and endpoints within the network.

Response

Once the threat is detected, the network must immediately reroute the traffic away from the intended target. The traffic can be rerouted by using DNS routing (domain name system) or BGP (border gateway protocol) routing. DNS and BGP routing is always-on, which means that it can immediately respond to attacks. With DNS, it is effective for application-layer and network-layer attacks. For BGP, this routing can be on-demand as well.

Filtering

By recognizing patterns that separate legitimate traffic from malicious traffic, DDoS attacks can be filtered without impacting the user experience. If an attack targets a specific server, the IT team can identify and block traffic directed to that server. This also ensures that the unaffected servers remain operational for legitimate users.

Analysis

To safeguard against future DDoS attacks, the IT team should conduct an analysis of the attack and the business’s security response. By analyzing information about the attack from system logs and analytics, a protection service can strengthen its defenses against future threats.

Selecting a DDos Mitigation Service Provider

When selecting the right DDoS prevention service for your business, there are a variety of considerations to look into. Key considerations involve evaluating factors such as the types of attacks it defends against, the extent of its protection, its detection and response capabilities, scalability and performance, and more.

Types of DDoS Attacks

There are different types of attacks, such as volume-based attacks, protocol attacks, and application-layer attacks. This means that you should consider which type of DDoS protection service is ideal for defending against huge traffic surges, identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in network protocols, or protecting specific web applications from targeted disruptions.

Protection Scope

The depth of defense is a critical factor in ensuring protection against threats. This includes network layer protection, which safeguards the entire infrastructure; application layer protection, providing dedicated security for individual applications; and a multi-layered defense, which integrates both approaches for comprehensive and holistic coverage. Together, these layers form a strong security framework.

Detection and Response Capabilities

Effective DDoS protection relies on a combination of critical capabilities. These capabilities consist of continuous monitoring, reporting, and automated mitigation. Continuous monitoring ensures real-time scrutiny of network traffic to detect suspicious activity, while alerting and reporting provide timely notifications and detailed insights to enable swift action. Lastly, automated mitigation delivers immediate responses to minimize the impact of ongoing attacks, ensuring seamless protection and reduced downtime.

Scalability and Performance

An effective DDoS service provider must be able to scale with the demands of a growing business. This is especially crucial to have while keeping pace with the increasing scale of DDoS attacks. Flexibility is essential forDDoS mitigation, requiring high traffic capacity to handle spikes, global scrubbing centers for broad coverage, and robust uptime with redundancy. This ensures continuous protection and minimal downtime for reliable performance.

Additional Considerations

And lastly, factors such as the budget and pricing model play a key role in aligning with the organization’s risk profile. The provider’s expertise and customer support are important because it ensures access to technical proficiency and reliable assistance. Finally, compliance with relevant data security and privacy regulations must be prioritized to meet legal and industry standards.

DDoS Mitigation for Data Centers

In data center environments, DDoS mitigation focuses on protecting the core infrastructure that powers businesses and services. Data centers are often prime targets for DDoS attacks due to their critical role in hosting applications, websites, and services. DDoS mitigation strategies involve detecting and filtering out malicious traffic at various levels such as the network, application, and server. This is all done while ensuring that legitimate traffic is not disrupted. As a result, this enables data centers to maintain performance, uptime, and reliability.

Overall, DDoS attacks can happen for both small and large businesses. Even in the scenario of large-scale attacks, data centers will be able to efficiently prevent DDoS attacks by implementing robust mitigation strategies. These strategies can range from traffic filtering, load balancing, rate limiting, and leveraging advanced tools such as intrusion detection systems and cloud-based protection services.

RackSolutions Mounting Equipment

To help manage your data center environment, we provide a wide range of server racks, server rack rails, and rack shelves that you can select from.

Racks: Our 4 Post and 2 Post racks are an effective way to mount your equipment. We provide open frame racks, enclosed racks, and wall mount racks.

Shelves: We provide rack shelves that come in different sizes and configurations to serve a wide variety of needs. To store your servers on the rack, you can choose between our fixed shelf or sliding shelf.

Rails: Server rack rails are a great way to mount your servers in a 4 post or 2 post rack.

If you have any questions about choosing the right product for your needs, don’t hesitate to contact our sales team. We provide a large selection of rails, rail kits, and universal rails. With our high-quality, in house manufacturing, you can be confident that you are buying the best equipment possible!

FAQs: DDoS Mitigation

What are other DDoS prevention methods?

To minimize or prevent a DDoS attack, methods such as attack surface reduction, anycast network diffusion, real time monitoring, caching, and rate limiting are used.

What are DDoS prevention tools?

Other than DDoS mitigation, another DDoS prevention tool that can be utilized is a web application firewall (WAF). It helps to block DDoS attacks by using customizable policies. This process consists of filtering, inspecting, and blocking malicious HTTP traffic between web applications and the Internet.