DDoS attack techniques and how to defend your website

With DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks becoming increasingly frequent, it is time to consider exactly how to defend your website. There are simple ways to ensure that you are protected against these potentially catastrophic attacks, so there has never been a better time to review your strategy and give yourself some peace of mind.

A DDoS attack is one which denies legitimate users access to a particular online service. They can affect any kind of website or network but are frequently used against e-commerce or bank websites. As well as bringing websites down, they can also affect expensively assembled infrastructure. DDoS attackers use small amounts of computer resources – which they frequently build themselves – to send bogus traffic to a particular website, thus preventing services working for genuine users.

Motives can range from activism to extortion or just plain old devilry, which can make it difficult when defending against DDoS attacks. The first step when considering DDoS protection is to test your organisation”s current set-up and resilience to attacks, which will help you understand how your systems and teams will react in a crisis. Services such as Cyber Security at NCC will help you to work out the status of your DDoS protection.

So how do you go about defending against DDoS attacks? Here we explore four possible strategies and their pros and cons:

Python scripts and your existing firewall

The cheapest but ultimately least effective form of defence is to do it yourself. Python scripts can be written to filter the traffic an attacker sends whilst some organisations try and rely on their own firewalls. However, these are only really effective against simple attacks and with ever-more complex and sophisticated threats out there, this should only be considered a temporary solution.

On-premises systems

You can purchase specialised hardware which sits in your office or data centre and acts as protection for your routers and servers. This will detect traffic that is malicious and filter it out and away from your website. A potentially expensive way of defending your website.

Your internet service provider

Some organisations use their internet service provider to give DDoS protection. The ISPs have the bandwidth to defend against major attacks which send huge volumes of traffic to a site, but there are problems with this strategy. Your ISP might not cover multiple network locations and may not protect your cloud-based data.

Cloud Mitigation Provider

Cloud mitigation providers are experts at defending against DDoS attacks from the cloud.

They have huge bandwidth and can cover a large number of data locations and can ensure that your website only gets sent clean or “good” traffic.

In conclusion, major organisations should be investigating cloud mitigation providers as a way of defending against DDoS attacks. It is the most comprehensive strategy available and will give your organisation the peace of mind it needs in its website security.