Falling victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack can be catastrophic: The average cost to an organization of a successful DDoS attack is about $100,000 for every hour the attack lasts, according to security company Cloudflare.
There are longer term costs too: loss of reputation, brand degradation and lost customers, all leading to lost business. That’s why it is worth investing significant resources to prevent a DDoS attack, or at least minimize the risk of falling victim to one, rather than concentrating on how to stop a DDoS attack once one has been started.
In the first article in this series, we discussed how to stop DDoS attacks. If you’re fortunate enough to have survived an attack – or are simply wise enough to think ahead – we will now address preventing DDoS attacks.
Understanding DDoS attacks
A basic volumetric denial of service (DoS) attack often involves bombarding an IP address with large volumes of traffic. If the IP address points to a Web server, legitimate traffic will be unable to contact it and the website becomes unavailable. Another type of DoS attack is a flood attack, where a group of servers are flooded with requests that need processing by the victim machines. These are often generated in large numbers by scripts running on compromised machines that are part of a botnet, and result in exhausting the victim servers’ resources such as CPU or memory.
A DDoS attack operates on the same principles, except the malicious traffic is generated from multiple sources, although orchestrated from one central point. The fact that the traffic sources are distributed – often throughout the world – makes DDoS attack prevention much harder than preventing DoS attacks originating from a single IP address.
Another reason that preventing DDoS attacks is a challenge is that many of today’s attacks are “amplification” attacks. These involve sending out small data packets to compromised or badly configured servers around the world, which then respond by sending much larger packets to the server under attack. A well-known example of this is a DNS amplification attack, where a 60 byte DNS request may result in a 4,000 byte response being sent to the victim – an amplification factor of around 70 times the original packet size.
More recently, attackers have exploited a server feature called memcache to launch memcached amplification attacks, where a 15 byte request can result in a 750 kb response, a amplification factor of more than 50,000 times the original packet size. The world’s largest ever DDoS attack, launched against Github in earlier this year, was a memcached amplification attack that peaked at 1.35 Tbps of data hitting Github’s servers.
The benefit to malicious actors of amplification attacks is that they need only a limited amount of bandwidth at their disposal to launch far larger attacks on their victims than they could do by attacking the victims directly.
Six steps to prevent DDoS attacks
1. Buy more bandwidth
Of all the ways to prevent DDoS attacks, the most basic step you can take to make your infrastructure “DDoS resistant” is to ensure that you have enough bandwidth to handle spikes in traffic that may be caused by malicious activity.
In the past it was possible to avoid DDoS attacks by ensuring that you had more bandwidth at your disposal than any attacker was likely to have. But with the rise of amplification attacks, this is no longer practical. Instead, buying more bandwidth now raises the bar which attackers have to overcome before they can launch a successful DDoS attack, but by itself, purchasing more bandwidth is not a DDoS attack solution.
2. Build redundancy into your infrastructure
To make it as hard as possible for an attacker to successfully launch a DDoS attack against your servers, make sure you spread them across multiple data centers with a good load balancing system to distribute traffic between them. If possible, these data centers should be in different countries, or at least in different regions of the same country.
For this strategy to be truly effective, it’s necessary to ensure that the data centers are connected to different networks and that there are no obvious network bottlenecks or single points of failure on these networks.
Distributing your severs geographically and topographically will make it hard for an attacker to successfully attack more than a portion of your servers, leaving other servers unaffected and capable of taking on at least some of the extra traffic that the affected servers would normally handle.
3. Configure your network hardware against DDoS attacks
There are a number of simple hardware configuration changes you can take to help prevent a DDoS attack.
For example, configuring your firewall or router to drop incoming ICMP packets or block DNS responses from outside your network (by blocking UDP port 53) can help prevent certain DNS and ping-based volumetric attacks.
4. Deploy anti-DDoS hardware and software modules
Your servers should be protected by network firewalls and more specialized web application firewalls, and you should probably use load balancers as well. Many hardware vendors now include software protection against DDoS protocol attacks such as SYN flood attacks, for example, by monitoring how many incomplete connections exist and flushing them when the number reaches a configurable threshold value.
Specific software modules can also be added to some web server software to provide some DDoS prevention functionality. For example, Apache 2.2.15 ships with a module called mod_reqtimeout to protect itself against application-layer attacks such as the Slowloris attack, which opens connections to a web server and then holds them open for as long as possible by sending partial requests until the server can accept no more new connections.
5. Deploy a DDoS protection appliance
Many security vendors including NetScout Arbor, Fortinet, Check Point, Cisco and Radware offer appliances that sit in front of network firewalls and are designed to block DDoS attacks before they can take effect.
They do this using a number of techniques, including carrying out traffic behavioral baselining and then blocking abnormal traffic, and blocking traffic based on known attack signatures.
The main weakness of this type of approach of preventing DDoS attacks is that the appliances themselves are limited in the amount of traffic throughput they can handle. While high-end appliances may be able to inspect traffic coming in at a rate of up to 80 Gbps or so, today’s DDoS attacks can easily be an order of magnitude greater than this.
6. Protect your DNS servers
Don’t forget that a malicious actor may be able to bring your web servers offline by DDoSing your DNS servers. For that reason it is important that your DNS servers have redundancy, and placing them in different data centers behind load balancers is also a good idea. A better solution may even be to move to a cloud-based DNS provider that can offer high bandwidth and multiple points-of-presence in data centers around the world. These services are specifically designed with DDoS prevention in mind. For more information, see How to Prevent DNS Attacks.
Source: https://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/how-to-prevent-ddos-attacks.html
