Efficiently Creating DDoS-Resistant Infrastructure

The world’s biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack reportedly happened in September 2024, but it failed to inflict notable damage. Unlike the October 2016 attack on major DNS provider Dyn, which resulted in the outages of major sites including Twitter, the September attack only made news because of its unprecedented volume.

This triumph for cybersecurity proves that it is possible to keep threats at bay with the right strategy and tools. When organizations put up adequate defenses, they don’t only survive without downtime or breaches – they often come out unscathed.

Creating DDoS-resilient infrastructure is not as arduous as some would think. Organizations can use the following key points as they establish formidable cyber protection, particularly when it comes to preventing DDoS attacks.

Hardening Network Architecture
Before deploying anti-DDoS tools, ensure that the network architecture itself is set up to make it less susceptible to the damaging effects of denial of service attacks. It is not possible to completely block DDoS attacks. However, there are effective tactics for mitigation, such as the use of Network Access Control (NAC), anycast routing, rate limiting, using redundant load balancers, and the segregation of critical services.

NAC entails the regulation of the flow of traffic at the network level. This is done through the creation of Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the setting up of security groups. Firewalls are also part of the ACL strategy, as we’ll detail below.

Anycast routing refers to the redirecting of traffic to ensure that it takes the shortest path to available servers. This disperses traffic across several servers, ensuring that traffic flow is not concentrated in one or a few points.

Rate limiting sets ceilings for the number of requests that can be accommodated from a specific IP or range of IP addresses over a period of time. This is done through tools like API Gateway, HAProxy, and NGINX. By ensuring that devices cannot issue abnormally high request volumes, rate limiting is a staple solution in bot-driven attacks.

Load balancers are used to distribute traffic across multiple servers to ensure smooth website or app performance and reliability. However, given the growing popularity and severity of DDoS attacks at present, load balancers can still be overwhelmed. Hence, it is important to implement redundancy across multiple availability zones to ascertain that in case one data center is taken down by an attack, the overall infrastructure continues to be operational.

Lastly, it is recommended to isolate critical services or systems to make it difficult for attacks to reach them. These resources can be secured using private subnets and virtual private clouds. It is easier to continue operating or restore normal operations from a DDoS attack because the critical services are separated.

Having the Right Firewalls
Conventional firewalls are no longer effective, even with optimized configurations and the addition of intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS). It is important to deploy firewalls designed for DDoS prevention. Organizations need next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) capable of advanced threat detection, and application control to contain the impact of DDoS that target specific applications, and built-in IDS/IPS to quickly detect and stop malicious activity.

Additionally, it is important to deploy application-level firewalls, including web application firewalls (WAFs). These firewalls are designed to stop attacks that target web apps such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. They can also identify and block customized DDoS attack patterns to make sure that even new attack variants do not make their way through the firewall.

Also, organizations that are still using hardware-based firewalls need to upgrade their devices to properly handle large volumes of traffic and ensure rapid packet inspection and filtering. It is advisable to have both on-premise and cloud-based firewalls to respond to threats comprehensively.

Continuous Monitoring and Agile Response
It is not enough to have a hardened architecture and the right tools. Organizations must also implement real-time monitoring and rapid response mechanisms. There is no such thing as a foolproof defense. Automated mechanisms can fail. As such, human intervention should be there when it is needed.

Fortunately, there are many advanced monitoring tools available to undertake constant monitoring. For example, those who subscribe to AWS can use AWS CloudWatch, while those who favor Alphabet’s cloud service can turn to Google Stackdriver. Many tools provide continuous monitoring functions to ensure that abnormal traffic patterns or the early signs of DDoS attacks are spotted and addressed before they inflict any damage.

Organizations also need to formulate a comprehensive incident response plan. This provides a structured framework that guides the actions to be taken during the entire cycle of a DDoS attack. It indicates team roles and responsibilities, the tools and resources to be used, communication protocols, details of Service Level Agreements with vendors, and strategies for keeping essential services available, mitigating the adverse impacts, and restoring normal operations.

Moreover, it is crucial to work closely with ISPs and web server providers. Web server and data center companies usually provide technical assistance alongside their DDoS mitigation solutions. Organizations should take full advantage of these integrated cyber protection services to make it easier to respond to DDoS attacks.

Adopting Security Best Practices
Lastly, organizations need to establish a cybersecurity culture through best practices. The thwarting of the record October 2024 DDoS attack may provide a sense of optimism, but you must remain vigilant.

Long-term DDoS stats and data suggest that DDoS continues to be a serious threat. This means the hardened infrastructure, anti-DDoS tools, and incident response plans should also be supplemented by security best practices.

Some of the fundamental security best practices include patch management for constant updating of apps and systems and the implementation of robust user authentication mechanisms. Also, it is important to conduct regular security audits that inquire about security issues and promptly resolve them.

You must also provide cybersecurity education to employees who have a role to play in detecting and mitigating attacks.

In Summary
As shown by the remarkable mitigation of 2024’s largest DDoS attack, organizations are not defenseless. They can prevail over the increasing scale and sophistication of DDoS attempts. With next-generation infrastructure defenses in place, along with vigilant, agile responses, today’s cyber teams can stand up to the rising threats.