What is a DDoS attack?
Distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attack is where multiple compromised computer systems at the same time flood a targeted system, such as a website or application server, with data and cause service disruption.
A DDoS attack aims to disrupt the normal functioning of a system by using its resources like bandwidth, processing power or memory so that it is no longer available for legitimate users.
A typical DDoS aggression is based on a large number of devices the attacker gained control over, often-through malware that turns them into “zombies” or “bots.”
Regular hardware such as home computers, web cameras and printers get hijacked before being told to order a slew of requests/data towards said target overloading it hence drastically slowing down or even collapsing the system.
DDos attacks are disruptive to the businesses, governments, and individuals under attack Disclose information about your normal traffic operating environment Lowers service Potential revenue for websites loses Headline folks tend assume you can’t protect yourselves services.
How does a DDoS attack work?
- Devices are infected:
In a first step the attacker infects many devices (for example computers, IoT devices etc.) with malware. These compromised devices, often called “bots” or “zombies,” can be controlled remotely by the attacker. These devices group together to create a ‘botnet.
- The attacker has command and control:
The botnet coordinates with a C2 (Command-and-control) server the target attacks are initiated by this server, which then gives instructions to the bots when and where they will attack.
3. The attacker gives the command and triggers any form of rapid traffic flooding from the innumerable bots to imbalance or bring down their target server. Types of traffic this could be in various formats.
HTTP Requests: A huge number of requests for the target web page.
SYN Floods: This is when a server becomes overwhelmed trying to establish new connections, which are not completed through use of the http:// protocol.
UDP Floods: Flood the target with User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets.
- Exhausting the Target:
The amount of incoming traffic is exhausting that it overloads the targeted resource, be bandwidth, CPU power or memory. This can cause the server to be bombarded with responses from actual users.
- Denial of Service:
The target system may gradually hang which leads to a crash or becomes completely unavailable for the legitimate user causing ‘denial of service’.
The duration of DDoS attacks varies, and can continue for hours or days on end depending upon the power behind a bit torrent attack versus the capability being mapped by our target: defense intersection.
Protecting yourself against DDOS attacks also frequently involves traffic filtering and load balancing, while providing DDoS mitigation services in order to absorb the attack or deflect it away from your site.
How to identify a DDoS attack
It can be difficult to know if you are under a DDoS attack, especially in the early phases. Demo these indications to tell no suspicious behavior occurring on your system such that you are under DDoS attack.
- Irregular Traffic Patterns:
A sudden and unexpected increase in traffic from countless IPs, some of which might even originate from different geographical zones can be good evidence that you’re experiencing a DDoS attack. This traffic surpasses by far anything your system is typically used to, even at its busiest times.
- Slow of Unresponsive Network:
A website or service being slower than normal could be an indication that your server may have been a victim DDoS. The malicious traffic is centered on the system.
3. Rising in Bizarre or Incomplete Requests:
You may encounter more partial requests (e.g., lots of SYN packets, but without the following ACK — this might be an indication that there is a flood attack targeting your server), or more suspicious/unnecessary looking traffic than usual.
4. Random Outages or Crashes:
When your outages, crashes, or service disruptions are frequent and cannot be explained rationally – usually persisting more than failures in the software department — it might mean that a DDoS has managed to overload all of its resources just like invading waves on an unfortified beach.
- Disproportionate Resource Utilization
A sudden spike in resource utilization (CPU, memory or even bandwidth) which does not match with the normal pattern of usage could indicate that your systems are under attack from a DDoS.
- Logs and Alerts:
Check the server logs or monitoring tools for anything out of order (for example, a single IP address making too many requests might be spidering suspiciously very fast). In practice you get alerted to things like traffic anomalies which can come in quite useful if an attack is underway on your instance.
Stay vigilant and keep an eye out for these indicators so you can alert your IT team to prepare a response if there is the possibility of it becoming a DDoS attack.
General list of DDoS Attacks
Six common Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks represent a risk. conditional format… Different types of Androgynous fashion:
1. Volumetric Attacks:
UDP Flood: In this type of DoS attack, the attacker sends a flood of UDP datagrams from randomly selected ports to random targets. This purpose is to use the bandwidth of target and make it unavailable for legitimate users.
ICMP Flood (Ping Flooding):
In this type of attack, an attacker sends a large number ICMP Echo Request (ping) packets as possible to the target. The server is flooded with so many requests that it cannot handle them all, and crashes as a result of this denial of service.
2. Protocol Attacks:
1- SYN Flood: This one is a TCP handshaking strike. The attacker sends a flood of SYN (synchronize) requests to the server, but never completes the handshake by sending back an ACK… Due to this server will have open connections which keep on using resources.
Ping of Death- in this, an attacker sends malformed or large packets to crash the system running overloading it and making them unavailable for further service.
3. Application Layer Attacks:
HTTP Flood: This attack abuses web services by sending a huge number of HTTP requests and make the server unable to keep up with all request that comes in. HTTP floods are more difficult to detect compared to application-layer volumetric attacks.
Slowloris: This DOS attack sends the HTTP headers in pieces to create a long pause between each piece. Eventually, the server runs out of resources to answer even legitimate requests.
4. Reflection and Amplification Attacks
DNS Amplification: Attacker sends small queries to DNS servers, that respond with much larger responses, sending these at the target. This inherently increases the volume of traffic being thrown to the target.
NTP Amplification (a type of reflection/internal attack): An amplification/reflection attack in which an attacker sends a small query to multiple NTP servers, with the spoofed IP address set as that of the intended target; each server directs its response to said target.
The worst part is that these attacks can be merged together or segmented to even have more demonstrable results, and hence it becomes very important to counter this in a timeline.