DDoS attacks are one of the most common ways of making servers go down, resulting in financial and reputational losses. A DDoS protected VPS hosting can considerably decrease the probability of your web presence happening to be a victim of a DDoS attack, saving your digital business from this disturbing event. What are DDoS attacks and how a DDoS-protected VPS can save you from them? Let’s see!
What is a DDoS attack?
The internet has been made possible thanks to a complex communication system. There are instances that send requests, there are instances that receive requests, there are instances that verify those requests, there are instances that make sure that those requests are genuine, and so on. DDoS attack is a way of attacking a server where the attackers take advantage of this complexity, using this communication system in an ill-intentioned way and loading it excessively with redundant requests that go nowhere and confuse the whole system.
DDoS refers to Distributed Denial of Service. Attacks of such kind started as just Denial of Service attacks and where a single device was used to attack another device that is connected to the network. As the device’s capacity and protection mechanisms improved, single DoS attacks became no longer relevant. Instead, distributed attacks became the new approach, where attackers started using a network of geographically distributed devices, referred to as botnets, that can launch attacks hundreds of times more powerful than simple DoS attacks used to be.
There are different types of DDoS attacks, each exploiting this or that weak spot of your system.
Also, as the means of protecting against such attacks develop, the attacks in turn become more cunning. For this reason, what you absolutely need is to use an up-to-date cutting-edge DDoS attacks solution.
How does DDoS protection works
DDoS attacks are attacks with ingenuine traffic which cannot be recognized by the system’s default configuration. Nevertheless, ingenuine traffic in most cases will have a suspicious behavior which can be detected and allow to filter this traffic out. The overall process of DDoS protection can be broken down into the following stages:
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Analysis and monitoring
First of all, a DDoS protection solution establishes a baseline of normal traffic patterns, and determines the standards of how normal traffic should look like. This includes such aspects as average traffic volume, typical user behavior, as well as regular access times. With this criteria established, the protection system continuously monitors the traffic in the real time so any anomalies like sudden spikes that deviate from the baseline are immediately detected.
Traffic filtering and scrubbing
Suspicious and potentially malicious traffic often has something that stands out compared to the genuine traffic from real users. Traffic can be filtered according to numerous criteria, including known blacklisted IP addresses or extremely untypical geographical locations.
Another practice that reduces those chances for a DDoS attack is rate limiting – the limiting of the overall number of requests that can be made from a single IP, since in case of DDoS attacks, an anomalously grand number of requests is often the case.
One more approach to discovering malicious traffic is Deep Packet Inspection. Here the content of packets sent is analyzed, and if this content has signs of malicious traffic, it’s then blocked.
DDoS protection systems often send traffic to special centers, scrubbing centers, where the traffic is separated into good traffic and bad traffic.
Response planning and mitigation strategies
DDoS protection systems have predefined plans and protocols, so they can respond to attacks quickly and efficiently. In case of an attack occurring, they also have mitigation strategies that allow them to minimize the impact of attacks that are already going on.
Post-attack analysis and improvements
DDoS protection systems regularly collect the data from the attacks they faced, conducting detailed analysis of attacks to acquire the information about its mechanisms and approaches, behavioral patterns and possible impact.
Based on the information discovered in such a way, DDoS protection systems release updates and add improvements to already established approaches.
Conclusion
DDoS attacks are one of the most common ways to interfere with one’s digital business. This may lead to undesired outcomes, making your website slow and inefficient. As you can see, DDoS protection mechanisms use the particularities of DDoS attacks behavior to recognize and to eventually block their source, saving your website from a DDoS attack. Security is cornerstone of a healthy life of a website, and DDoS protection is a key element of it. We hope that the information above was sufficient for you to understand the nature of DDoS attacks and the mechanism behind the protection against them and wish you good luck in finding an optimal DDoS protection solution.
