DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks is of major concern in cybersecurity today. The DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disturb the regular traffic of a particular server or network by overburdening the target or the network around it with huge Internet traffic. While most people assume that they don’t occur frequently, on the contrary, they haven’t vanished altogether and had just been dormant. In the last few months, however, it is being reported. AWS reported a 2.3 Tbps attack Which tried to affect the cloud services in early 2020 in the month of February.
The Growth of DDoS attacks
Such attacks to networks are intolerable however, cloud providers, ISPs, CSPs, and various enterprises are always at risk of attack. With every day developing technology, these attacks are becoming worse and risk is getting higher and is expected to grow more and more attacking a lot of networks and IoT devices as well. The recent attack that occurred was a reflection attack by using a tricked address of the target. The target was flooded with humongous data which if not mitigated properly could bring a number of services down.
Mitigation solutions
Despite the risks of DDoS attacks, luckily, there are certain solutions. It is known that the DDoS attacks are due to inflowing traffic and hence most solutions involve tracking the traffic that is periodically sampled and directed towards scrubbing centers when a possible attack is seen.
This particular way has a few shortcomings. Sampling, although a good practice, unline inline inspection, may fail to detect the hit-and-run attacks that can completely affect the service quality and even complete services. The directing or rerouting of traffic involves latency which directly affects the user experience. Whilst, the major solutions look into the incoming attacks, ignoring the outgoing attacks generated from devices is evident and is significantly a huge threat.
Also Read: 4 Infamous Network Security Threats That Every Internet User Must Know
There are other solutions and rather effective solutions to the attacks. One brilliant example is Allot’s DDoS Secure that involves inspecting each data packet to check for anomalous traffic behavior irrespective of its unique identity and discarding the same before they affect the network or the user experience. The actions have been seen in the case of the CLDAP Memcached attack at several customer sites even before it was the true authenticity was found out.
Outbound DDoS attacks
Generally, people think that a DDoS attack means it is an incoming attack, but there is another kind of DDoS attack. Contradicting the incoming attacks, these are outgoing attacks that involve devices like home devices, IoT, enterprise devices, mobiles, etc to launch the attacks via the CSP network of the device you own, by making your device a mirage of the source. This can definitely harm your reputation and credibility and as a result, can cost you your network services.
About Ankita Mohanty
Ankita Mohanty is a Software Engineer who has the passion for content creation, tech and travel. She believes in that there's nothing in this world that's unachievable when you work hard for it.