Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack is an action by which cybercriminals send a large amount of invalid traffic that makes your website exhausted and inaccessible. This causes serious harm to businesses when customers cannot use the website for communication or transaction purposes. The following article will help you understand what DDoS is and how to secure your business against cyber attacks.
1. What is DoS?
DoS (Denial of Service) stands for denial of service attack. This is a security problem that occurs when an attacker tries to prevent computer users using the network from accessing the server. The most common form of DoS attack is that the hacker will send a large amount of traffic to the server system, draining the victim’s resources. As a result, your website will be inaccessible for a while, damaging your business.
2. Researching DoS. Denial of Service Attack Methods
The target of common DoS attacks today is usually virtual servers (VPS) or web servers of banks, e-commerce sites, etc. Denial of service attacks only targets one target of the system. victim system with slow attack speed and can be easily prevented because hackers use only one system from one location. Besides, during a DoS attack, the hacker can only use a single device with the same IP range to attack. Therefore, tracking DoS attacks is quite easy and can be remedied in a short time.
3. What is DDoS and how to prevent it?
3.1. What is DDoS?
Another upgraded variant of DoS is DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) which stands for distributed denial of service attack. In DDoS. Hackers will take advantage of attacks on Layer 7 (network layer) where ISPs (Internet Service Providers) ignore security, the attacker will send a large amount of invalid traffic at high speed. attack faster than DoS, causing the business website to encounter an inaccessible error. DDoS is even more dangerous for enterprise servers when these attacks are sent from many different devices, making it impossible to monitor and prevent timely.
A Server can only handle a certain number of requests at a time, so when hackers send too many requests at the same time, it will exhaust the server’s resources, cause overload and lead to poor performance. inability to process other requests. As a result, users cannot access your Server while being attacked
3.2. Types of DDoS Attacks
The most common types of protocol-based DDoS attacks are:
· Volumetric Attacks: this is a DDoS attack based on the available bandwidth consumption of the target server. This is a dangerous attack for your Server if the server’s bandwidth is not greater than the attack bandwidth, it will lead to the server being unavailable to access.
For example, if your server has a 15Gbps network port, hackers will send requests over 15Gps, causing requests from real users to not reach the server and vice versa. If a large-scale attack causes the server to be a full port, the service can be slow and erratic.
· SYN floods: This attack exploits TCP processes. The attacker sends TCP requests with fake IP addresses to the target. The target system responds and waits for the sender to confirm the handshake. Since the attacker never sends a response to complete the process, incomplete processes pile up and eventually crash the server.
· Smurf DDoS: Hackers use malware to generate a packet with a spoofed IP address. This packet contains an ICMP ping message that asks for a persistent response and thereby creates an infinite response loop causing temporary system crashes.
· Zero Day DDoS: The “Zero Day” based attack is simply a method of attacking web vulnerabilities when they are not yet patched.
· Application-Level Attacks: Targets vulnerable applications. Instead of trying to flood the entire server, an attacker would focus the attack on one or a few applications. Web-based email clients, WordPress, Joomla, and forum software are good examples of specific goals.
3.3. Experimental DDoS attack guide
The fact that hackers DDoS attacks on websites/applications not only cause damage to businesses but also affects the customer experience. During the time the website is under DDoS, customers will not be able to access and perform desired operations and transactions. Nowadays, there are many freely available tools that you can use for DDoS attack testing to help you better understand how dangerous a distributed denial-of-service attack is.
DDoS attack, we will use LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) developed by Praetox Technology and used by the world’s most notorious Anonymous hacker group to attack DDoS in recent times.
Steps to perform a DDoS attack with LOIC:
Step 1: Download LOIC
You can download the LOIC from SourceForge. The next thing to do is turn off the virus detection software warning and extract the zip file after successful download.
Step 2: Launch LOIC and start DDoS attack
After running LOIC, a menu will appear for you to configure with LOIC. There are many options that you can configure such as choosing IP or URL, configuring a port as well as several streams, DDoS attack speed, etc.
Step 3: Confirm
After successful configuration, you just need to click on “IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER” to activate and see how the attack occurs.
After testing the attack simulation, the attacked website will consume a large number of resources because it has to process all requests from the large amount of invalid traffic generated by the DDoS.
To overcome the situation of attacks that disrupt access as well as minimize the damage caused by cybercriminals to businesses, let’s work with VNETWORK to learn and choose effective anti - DDoS tools.
3.4. How to prevent DDoS
Currently, there are three different types of WAF (Web Application Firewall) built, they can prevent DDoS attacks by protocol, DDoS by traffic, or DDoS by bandwidth as follows:
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Network-Based
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Cloud-Based (Cloud Platform)
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Host-Based (Server Platform)
The third type of WAF is capable of providing a higher degree of customization (many custom rules). It helps Anti-DDoS attacks such as extremely powerful UDP. This type of WAF is especially suitable for local systems (such as a bank’s intranet). However, this method needs to run on local servers, which requires on-site maintenance. This is an expensive WAF in terms of infrastructure and licensing costs. Its next limitation is the ability to scale up / scale down, and it is difficult to handle DDoS attacks in the form of traffic.
Therefore, Cloud-Based is a solution that is getting more attention from businesses because of the simplicity and convenience of the cloud, the ability to scale up/down unlimitedly. In addition, it also helps to optimize storage and maintenance costs.
You can sign up for a trial experience of VNETWORK’s Cloud WAF service, which also combines with Multi CDN 404 (Content Delivery Network 404) to create 2 strong layers of security capable of preventing all forms of DDoS attacks (both UDP and TCP). Hotline: (028) 7306 8789 or email to: contact@vnetwork.vn - sales@vnetwork.vn.