

Paul Froutan is vice president of engineering at Rackspace Managed Hosting, a provider of managed hosting services in San Antonio. Organizations need to ensure operational continuity and resource availability with a vigilant DDoS mitigation approach if they want to conduct "business as usual." Our reliance on the Internet continues to grow, and the threat of DDoS attacks continues to expand. Since the primary effect of most attacks is to consume your Internet bandwidth, a well-equipped managed hosting provider has both the bandwidth and appliances to mitigate the effects of an attack.ĭDoS attacks are destructive stealth weapons that can shutter a business. The nature of an attack will often change midstream, requiring the company to react quickly and continuously over several hours or days. One advantage of using an outsourced service provider is that you can buy services on demand, such as burstable circuits that give you more bandwidth when you need it, rather than making an expensive capital investment in redundant network interfaces and devices.įor the most part, companies don't know in advance that a DDoS attack is coming. Over-provisioning: or buying excess bandwidth or redundant network devices to handle spikes in demand can be an effective approach to handling DDoS attacks. The server infrastructure will have to be robust enough to handle this traffic and continue to serve legitimate clients. Some legitimate traffic will be dropped, and some illegitimate traffic will get to the server. These devices have varying levels of effectiveness. Combined with a DDoS mitigation appliance, optimized servers stand a chance of continued operations through a DDoS attack.ĭDoS mitigation appliances: Several companies either make devices dedicated to sanitizing traffic or build DDoS mitigation functionality into devices used primarily for other functions such as load balancing or firewalling. An administrator can explicitly define what resources an application can use and how it will respond to requests from clients. Servers: Proper configuration of server applications is critical in minimizing the effect of a DDoS attack.
#BANDWIDTH DDOS MANUAL#
On the downside, they're not automated, so they need manual tuning by security experts, and they often generate false positives. They can be used in conjunction with firewalls to automatically block traffic. Intrusion-detection systems: IDS solutions will provide some anomaly-detection capabilities so they will recognize when valid protocols are being used as an attack vehicle. Firewalls can shut down a specific flow associated with an attack, but like routers, they can't perform antispoofing. However, routers are typically ineffective against a more sophisticated spoofed attack and application-level attacks using valid IP addresses. Routers and firewalls: Routers can be configured to stop simple ping attacks by filtering nonessential protocols and can also stop invalid IP addresses. Similarly, packet-filtering and rate-limiting measures simply shut everything down, denying access to legitimate users.

The downside is that all traffic is discarded - both good and bad - and the targeted business is taken off-line. So how do you protect your company's servers from the onslaught of data sent from infected PCs across the Internet? How do you keep a DDoS attack from bringing down your company's network? There are several approaches you can take to defend against a DDoS attack:īlack-holing or sinkholing: This approach blocks all traffic and diverts it to a black hole, where it is discarded. With an application attack, TCP or HTTP resources are prevented from processing transactions or requests.

In a bandwidth attack, network resources or equipment are consumed by a high volume of packets. Typical types of DDoS attacks include bandwidth attacks and application attacks. What makes DDoS attacks such a challenge is that illegitimate packets of data are virtually indistinguishable from legitimate ones. DDoS attacks take advantage of the openness of the Internet and its benefit of delivering packets of data from nearly any source to any destination.
