While theoretically simple, DDoS attacks are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of hackers wanting to wreak havoc online. DDoS, short for distributed denial-of-service attacks, are cyberattacks in which the perpetrator bombards a website or online service with fraudulent requests to "bring down" the network or server by overloading it with traffic. These fraudulent requests, which can come from many different computers or devices, may range from messages to connection requests; anything that's going to stop the target of the attack from being able to cope with the amount of traffic it's being hit with.
They also often work using networks of what are known as "zombie computers," referring to machines that have been hacked, sometimes without the user even knowing it. Increasingly, the ever-growing number of Internet of Things devices (recently estimated at totaling more than 22 billion worldwide) are also used in such "botnet" attacks that harness these vast number of infected computers like cyberattacking Manchurian Candidates and then use them to carry out the attacks. Sometimes low-level DDoS attacks are accompanied by ransom demands, usually to be paid in cryptocurrency. In this case, the hackers may threaten a far worse DDoS attack if the ransom is not paid.
Pretty bad, right? Unfortunately, it gets worse. The first DDoS attack took place in 2000 when 15-year-old Michael Calce, a.k.a. Mafiaboy hacked into computer networks of multiple universities, and then used these servers to attack -- and crash -- major websites such as eBay, Yahoo, and CNN. But since then the size and sophistication of DDoS attacks has only gotten worse.
By 2016, the volume size of a DDoS attack was capable of exceeding one terabit every single second: a mind bogglingly large amount of traffic. In 2018, the online code repository GitHub was hit was a massive DDoS attack that threw a massive 1.3 terabit per second at it. In June 2020, a packet-based volumetric DDoS attack involving 316,000 sending addresses was used in a four-day attack that sent up to 754 million packets per second to just one Cloudflare attack. While this may be on the high end of a DDoS attack today, it nonetheless shows just how devastating -- and devastatingly sustained -- they can be, and why DDoS protection for organizations in this day and age has become a necessity.
Some of the different types of DDoS attack
Although DDoS attacks all fall under the same broad umbrella, there are nonetheless a large number of variations and different techniques they can involve. Not every DDoS attack uses the exact same approach.
DDoS attacks use a broad range of approaches, whether that's flooding victims with ping command-based ICMP echo requests or multi-vector attacks. There are thousands of different ways that an attack could be carried out (referred to as "attack vectors"). However, attack vectors most typically fall into three broad categories.
The first is the volumetric attack which batters servers into submission by congesting their bandwidth with traffic packets.
The second, referred to as protocol attacks, targets severs and exploits the ways that systems communicate with one another. A protocol attack could well be an SYN flood in which it consumes all the available server resources by overloading it with initial connection request (SYN) packets. The result is that a server can be made unavailable to traffic from users.
The third, an application attack, seeks out vulnerabilities in web server applications or software in order to cause it to crash. This is a bit like hitting the refresh button on a browser constantly on a massive number of computers. In more complicated versions of this attack, a hacker could utilize many IP addresses at once with random user agents and referrers.
Defending against these attacks
DDoS attacks aren't going away. They may be evolving, but they're only going to become more commonplace. That is particularly true with the rise of DDoS-for-hire services, which makes it easier (and cheaper) than ever for bad actors to launch massive distributed denial-of-service assaults on victims. It will only cost a few bucks (think double digits) for a botnet rental that will attack a target with up to 300 gigabits. As the barrier to entry lowers, the number of cases is bound to increase.
It's for this reason that it is more important than ever to deploy robust DDoS protection. Some particularly devastating DDoS attacks can be financially ruinous for a business. Even when this is not the case, a sustained attack has the potential to cause a business considerable (unwanted) downtime that can cost visitors and, possibly, customers.
Traditional safeguards are not enough to protect against DDoS attacks. For instance, traditional firewalls can become a bottleneck for requests on their own. As a result, they can make attacks even worse, rather than improving them.
Dealing with DDoS attacks is a major challenge for any business. Fortunately, there are companies that will help: offering services such as DDoS deflation in which they can help absorb multi-gigabyte DDoS attacks, block bad traffic before it reaches you, and monitor the behavior of suspicious users and turn away undesirables Just make sure that you choose the right company to safeguard you -- offering flexible, scalable, and intelligent solutions -- and you'll be able to forget about the risk of such attacks. And get on with business as usual. Like it's 1999 and DDoS attacks haven't yet been invented.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of techtimes.com
