A Complete Guide to DDoS Attacks: What They Are and How to Protect Yourself

What is a DDoS Attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious effort aimed at disrupting the normal functioning of an online service, causing interruptions that can affect servers, networks, devices, applications, and specific transactions.

What is a DDoS Attack?

Unlike a typical Denial of Service (DoS) attack, which relies on a single system to flood a target with malicious data or requests, a DDoS attack leverages multiple devices to launch a coordinated assault. This multiplicity amplifies the attack’s potency and makes it more challenging to defend against.

How Do DDoS Attacks Work?

In a DDoS attack, the perpetrators utilize numerous compromised systems, often part of a botnet, to inundate the target with overwhelming traffic. This deluge can completely paralyze the target’s operations, from basic network functions to specific application processes, effectively blocking legitimate users’ access.

Targets and Impact

DDoS attacks often strike high-profile targets such as banks, e-commerce sites, news outlets, and other critical online services. The consequences are severe, ranging from operational downtime and financial losses to compromised sensitive information. In some cases, attackers may even demand ransom to cease the attack, adding a layer of extortion.

Challenges in Detection and Prevention

Detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks is particularly challenging due to the sheer volume of traffic they generate. This traffic can easily blend with legitimate user traffic, making it hard to identify and filter out the malicious activity. As attackers continually evolve their tactics, the need for robust and adaptive defense mechanisms becomes increasingly crucial.

In summary, DDoS attacks represent a significant threat to online services, requiring continuous vigilance and advanced security measures to protect against these pervasive disruptions.

How Does a DDoS Attack Work?

Most DDoS attacks are executed using botnets, which consist of vast networks of compromised IoT devices, malware-infected computers, and other internet-enabled gadgets controlled by hackers.

The attacker directs these botnet machines to flood a specific website or server IP address with an enormous volume of connection requests.

This influx of traffic overwhelms the targeted website or service, exceeding its server or network capacity. Consequently, the affected websites or online services become inaccessible to users, as their internet bandwidth, RAM, and CPU resources are exhausted.

The effects of these DDoS attacks can vary from minor annoyances and service disruptions to complete shutdowns of websites, applications, or even entire businesses.

Impacts of DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks can affect victims in several ways.

• Financial loss
• Damage to reputation
• Data loss
• Damage to customer trust
• Impact on essential services
• The direct and indirect costs involved in restoring systems
• Impact on third parties

Basic Types of DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks generally fall into one or more categories, with some advanced attacks combining attacks on different vectors. Following are the three main categories of DDoS attacks.

1. Volumetric attacks

This is the classic type of DDoS attack, employing methods to generate large volumes of fake traffic to fully flood the bandwidth of a website or server. This fake traffic makes it impossible for real traffic to flow into or out of the targeted site. These attacks include UDP, ICMP, and spoofed-packet flood attacks. The size of volume-based attacks is measured in bits per second (BPS).

2. Protocol attacks

These attacks are more focused and utilize the vulnerabilities of resources in a server. They consume existing server resources or intermediate communication equipment like firewalls and load balances and send large packets to them. These attacks usually include SYN floods, Ping of Death, fragmented packet attacks, Smurf DDoS, etc., and their size is measured in packets per second (PPS).

3. Application layer attacks

These are the most sophisticated type of DDoS attacks, which targets specific web applications. Overwhelming applications with malicious requests carry them out. The size of these attacks is measured in requests per second (RRS).

Styles of DDoS Attacks

1. UDP and ICMP floods

These are the most common attack styles that fall under volumetric attacks. UDP floods drown host resources with User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets. In contrast, ICMP floods do the same with Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request (ping ) packets until the service gets overwhelmed.

Furthermore, attackers tend to use reflection attacks to increase the crushing flow of these floods where the victim’s IP address is spoofed to make the UDP or ICMP request. The response is sent back to the server itself as the malicious packet appears to be coming from the victim. This way, these attacks consume both incoming and outgoing bandwidth.

2. DNS Amplification

As the name suggests, these attacks involve criminals sending numerous DNS search requests to render a network non-functional. The amplification exhausts the bandwidth of the server by expanding the outbound traffic flow.

This is done by sending information requests to the server that output high amounts of data as the response and then routing that data directly back to the server by spoofing the reply-to address.

So, the attacker sends numerous relatively small packets to a publicly accessible DNS server through many different sources of a botnet. They are all requests for a lengthy response, like DNS name lookup requests. Then, the DNS server replies to each of these dispersed requests with response packets, including many orders of more big data than the initial request packet, with all that data being sent right back to the DNS server of the victim.

3. Ping of Death

This is another protocol attack where the attacker sends several malicious or malformed pings to a computer. While the maximum length of an IP packet is 65,535 bytes, the data link layer limits the maximum frame size allowed over an Ethernet network.

Hence, a large IP packet is split into multiple packets (called fragments), and the recipient host reassembles these fragments to create a complete packet. In the Ping of Death situation, the host ends up with an IP packet larger than 65,535 bytes when trying to reassemble the fragments of the malicious pings. This causes the overflow of the memory buffers allocated for the packet, resulting in a denial of service even for legitimate data packets.

4. SYN Flood

SYN Flood is one of the most common protocol attacks that circumvent the three-way handshake process needed to establish TCP connections between clients and servers.

These connections are usually made with the client making an initial synchronize (SYN) request of the server, the server replying with an acknowledging (SYN-ACK) response, and the client completing the handshake with a final acknowledgment (ACK).

SYN floods work by making a rapid succession of those initial synchronization requests and leaving the server hanging by never replying with a final acknowledgment. Ultimately, the server is called on to keep open a bunch of half-open connections that eventually overwhelm resources until the server crashes.

5. HTTP Flood

These are one of the most common types of application-layer DDoS attacks. There, the criminal makes interactions that appear normal with a web server or application.

Even though all these interactions come from web browsers to look like normal user activity, they’re arranged to consume as many resources from the server as possible.

The request made by the attacker can include anything from calling up URLs for documents or images using GET requests to making the server process calls to a database using POST requests.

DDoS attack services are often being sold on the dark web.

How to Detect a DDoS Attack

DDoS attacks can often sound like non-malicious things that can create availability issues. For instance, they may seem like a downed server or a system, too many requests from actual users, or sometimes a cut cable. So you will always need to analyze traffic to determine what is happening.

If you have become the victim of a DDoS attack, you will notice a sudden surge of incoming traffic, leading your server to crash under pressure. Moreover, if you visit a website under a DDoS attack, it will load extremely slow or show the 503 “service unavailable” error. You will probably be unable to access that site until the attack is turned down.

Symptoms of DDoS attacks

A site or service becoming slow is the most obvious symptom of a DDoS attack. The common symptoms of a DDoS attack include:

• Slow access to files located locally or remotely
• Inability to access a specific website for a long term
• A huge amount of traffic from one specific source or IP address
• An overflow of traffic from users indicating similar behavior, device type, web browser, and location
• A sudden and abnormal surge in requests to a page
• Problems with accessing all websites
• Large amounts of spam emails
• Internet disconnectivity

While a legitimate traffic surge can also cause performance issues, it is essential to investigate further. Especially, an analysis should be done when the traffic appears abnormal.

Ex: An online shop experiences a spike in traffic just after Black Friday sales, Christmas, etc. Apart from the symptoms mentioned above, DDoS attacks have specific symptoms, depending on the type of attack.

Furthermore, if a botnet uses your computer to conduct a DDoS attack, it will show the following warning signs.

• A sudden decrease in performance
• System crashes
• Frequent error messages
• Extremely slow internet speed

How to Protect Yourself Against DDoS Attacks

Protecting yourself from a DDoS attack can be a challenging task. Organizations have to plan well to defend and prevent such attacks.

Identifying your vulnerabilities is the key and initial step of any protection strategy. Apart from that, the steps mentioned below will help decrease an organization’s attack surface and mitigate the damage done by a DDoS attack.

1. Take quick actions by informing the ISP provider, having a backup ISP, and rerouting the traffic.
2. Configure firewalls and routers to help decline fake traffic as an initial layer of defense.
3. Protect individual computers by installing antivirus or security software with the latest security patches.
4. Analyze application architecture and implementation. The application should be implemented, so user actions do not deplete system resources or overconsume application components.
5. Monitor network traffic to get alerts on unexpected spikes in network traffic. It will help identify network-targeted DoS attacks. You will be able to gain additional insight by analyzing the origin of the traffic.
6. Monitor system health and responsiveness by running frequent health checks to recognize system-targeted DoS attacks.
7. Evaluate application health and responsiveness by running frequent health checks on application components. It can help identify application-targeted DDoS attacks.
8. Create a mitigation plan. Different types of DDoS attacks need different strategies for mitigation. Many providers now offer strategies and mechanisms to prevent DDoS attacks. So consider if your provider’s strategies and mechanisms fit your needs well.

Additionally, practicing internet safety habits will prevent your devices from being used in botnets.

Use strong passwords

Use long, unique, and difficult-to-guess passwords for all your accounts. In addition, you can use a password manager to store and sync passwords across your devices securely.

Use up-to-date software

Outdated software is full of cracks that hackers can use to get into your system. So constantly update your software and install the updates and patches released by software vendors as soon as possible. These updates are often built to address various security vulnerabilities.

Be cautious of strange links and attachments

Cybercriminals try to make you download their malware using emails containing malicious links or attachments. So don’t engage with those emails if you are unaware of the sender. Furthermore, you can use an email security tool to check email attachments for malware.

Use a firewall

A firewall is capable of blocking access to and from unauthorized sources. Moreover, a smart firewall can prevent hackers from communicating with your machines if they try to infect them with botnet malware.

Conclusion

DDoS attacks provide a way for intruders to make a website or online service unavailable for a certain period or indefinitely.

They vary widely in complexity and can severely impact the targeted businesses or organizations. Therefore, online businesses and organizations should take every possible step to mitigate DDoS attacks and secure their systems.

FAQ

Why do Cyber Security professionals should worry about DDoS attacks?

DDoS attacks can heavily damage critical online resources’ availability and act as a deceptive mechanism to perform other illegal activities on the network.

Why is it difficult to prevent DDoS attacks with traditional forms of cybersecurity filtering?

Since DDoS attacks are carried out in a distributed nature using multiple systems, it is difficult to block the malicious traffic by closing a particular fixture.

What is the role of a botnet in a DDoS attack?

Botnets are networks of compromised devices controlled by cybercriminals, which are sometimes called bots or zombies. These compromised devices can include devices such as desktops, laptops, servers, and IoT devices. Attackers communicate with these machines and combine them to generate distributed sources of malicious traffic to overwhelm a company’s infrastructure.