Distributed denial of service (DDOS) Attack tutorial
When cybercriminals launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, they bombard a target network with malicious traffic to render it unusable. The frequency and destructiveness of DDoS attacks are rising along with their sophistication. In the first quarter of 2021, there were almost 3 million DDoS attacks, up 31% from the corresponding period in 2020, according to InfoSecurity Magazine. Attackers are also coming up with strategies for making money from DDoS attacks. In the past, DDoS attacks were typically conducted with the intention of upsetting the target organization's operations and/or harming its reputation. Now, in some circumstances, the attacker will ask the victim for money to stop the attack.
How Do DDoS Attacks Work?
Once infected, they will be ordered to simultaneously launch an attack, thus overwhelming the target server. It's important to note that few cybersecurity experts truly comprehend how DDoS attacks function, let alone know how to stop them. This is so because DDoS attacks don't need to use malware or make overt phishing attempts in order to be effective; instead, they start from outside of their networks.
What Are Some Common Types of DDoS Attacks?
There is a limit to the number of requests that web servers and other network resources can process simultaneously. If a server or network resource receives more requests than it can handle, it will grind to a halt and stop processing new requests. A 'botnet' is typically used in a DDoS attack to deliver heavy traffic. In other words, hackers will attempt to compromise remote devices, typically on an ad-hoc basis, using social engineering or another technique, in order to create a network of computers, or "zombie networks," It helps to have a basic understanding of how network connections are made in order to help us better understand how DDoS attacks operate. According to the OSI model, network connections on the internet are made up of layers. The following are these layers:
The various DDoS attack types are briefly described below, along with how they relate to the OSI model;
Application layer attacks
Attacks on the application layer, also known as layer 7 or HTTP flooding attacks, target the server's layer that creates web pages. A single HTTP response costs more to compute than an HTTP request because servers must load multiple files and perform database searches to build a web page. Due to the difficulty in separating malicious from legitimate traffic, it is difficult to defend against application layer attacks.
Protocol attacks
Attacks on protocols target load balancers and firewalls, among other pieces of network hardware. These attacks intend to overwhelm network resources in order to disable them. Protocol attacks frequently target the Network and Transport Layers, blocking access to the Application Layer.
Volumetric attacks
A volumetric attack aims to utilise all of the target network's available bandwidth. They frequently use DNS amplification to boost the volume of traffic sent to the target network, making it inaccessible, by taking advantage of the capabilities of open DNS resolvers. A botnet may, however, occasionally be used to saturate the network with traffic. In contrast to a volumetric attack, which targets the Data Link Layer, Transport Layer, and Network Layer, bandwidth is relevant to the Physical Layer.
How Can You Mitigate a DDoS Attack?
As was already mentioned, it is very difficult to distinguish between legitimate traffic and DDoS traffic, which is the main issue we face when trying to mitigate DDoS attacks. This is due to the fact that DDoS traffic can originate from a wide variety of sources, target a wide variety of network resources, and take many different forms. Examples of multiple attack pathways used by some DDoS attack vectors include HTTP flooding and DNS amplification. As a result, we must adopt a multi-layered strategy that may include the following methods:
Blackhole routing
Here, traffic is directed into a "blackhole," where it is essentially discarded. If the restriction criteria are properly set up, this strategy may work. If not, the network will become inaccessible due to the loss of both legitimate and malicious network traffic.
Rate limiting
A DDoS attack can be reduced in severity by restricting the number of requests a server will accept in a given period of time. Rate limiting, however, cannot completely shield against DDoS attacks.
Web application firewall
The Application Layer is the main target of a Web Application Firewall (WAF). You can filter out specific kinds of malicious traffic by inserting a WAF between the internet and your network. Machine learning techniques are also used by contemporary WAF solutions to identify anomalous activity patterns.
Anycast network diffusion
Anycast is a network addressing and routing technique that allows for flexible routing of incoming requests. To put it simply, it disperses traffic among a network of dispersed servers, preventing a DDoS attack from rendering any particular server or resource inaccessible. The size of the attack and the network have an impact on how well anycast network diffusion works. Naturally, the effectiveness will increase with the size of the distributed server network.
What Sets a DDoS Attack Apart from a DoS Attack?
Although DoS (Denial of Service) and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks aim to overwhelm a network with malicious traffic, there are a few minor distinctions between them. A DoS attack does not require the development of a botnet of distributed devices, in contrast to a DDoS attack. As an alternative, it employs a single-source SYN flood that interferes with the TCP three-way handshake. DoS attacks frequently target a small number of servers rather than entire networks or the intermediary devices that connect the attacker and the target organisation. DDoS attacks have grown in popularity recently because they are more potent than DoS attacks.
Conclusion
DDoS attacks can cause a lot of disruption and harm to your business, so it's critical that you have a good incident response strategy in place. How to ddos attack a website, With Lepide, you can instantly respond to threats using predefined threat models and audit changes and interactions in Active Directory and data stores in real time.