Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks surged this year, according to recent reports. DDoS attacks can overwhelm a network, disrupt services, and cause significant financial and reputational damage.
But with a wide range of DDoS protection solutions available on the market, it can be hard to identify which is the best one to meet your organization’s needs.
The following checklist outlines the top 8 “must-haves” in a DDoS mitigation solution – ensuring that your organization is resilient to DDoS attacks.
1. Monitoring and Alerting
Continuous monitoring and real-time alerting are critical for early detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks. Organizations with full visibility into their DDoS attack surface through robust monitoring and alerting capabilities will have more effective security. These capabilities enable security teams to respond quickly to threats and to minimize the potential damage.
2. Autoscalability
Autoscalability is essential to maintaining business continuity during large-scale DDoS attacks, which can otherwise lead to significant downtime and disruption. Based on the intensity of an attack, autoscalability allows DDoS protection systems to automatically scale up and down in real time, as necessary. This ensures that an organization’s defenses can handle sudden spikes in traffic without manual intervention.
3. Bot Protection
With the increasing prevalence of bot attacks, robust bot protection is key to safeguarding applications and APIs. Effective DDoS solutions include bot detection and mitigation mechanisms that identify and block malicious bots, while allowing through the legitimate traffic.
4. Visibility into Network Traffic
Visibility into network traffic is essential for identifying and mitigating sophisticated DDoS attacks. This visibility allows the detection of patterns and anomalies that may indicate an ongoing or imminent attack. Platforms with broad visibility provide more comprehensive insights into DDoS trends and attack methodologies, enabling you to develop effective defense strategies.
5. Combining Multiple Protection Technologies
By combining techniques like filtering, behavioral analysis, and protocol specific challenges, organizations can maintain comprehensive DDoS protection. This type of holistic approach provides more robust security that safeguards your organization’s network integrity.
6. Multi-Layered Defense
Best practices for DDoS protection usually involve a hybrid solution, where both cloud-based and on-premises DDoS protection products are integrated to stop real-time DDoS attacks. An example of such a combination usually includes the following components:
- A CDN – A cloud-based protection that inspects incoming requests to the organization’s FQDN addresses. This will usually act as your 1st line of defense for domain name-based requests destined for your online services.
- A Scrubbing Center – A cloud-based protection that acts as the 1st line of defense for all incoming traffic destinated to your organization’s actual IP addresses. If you also have CDN-based cloud protection, it will usually serve as your 2nd line of defense for domain-based requests. This type of DDoS protection is mostly used to prevent volumetric DDoS attacks.
- On-premises, dedicated DDoS mitigation equipment that searches for sophisticated DDoS attacks that are not blocked by the organization’s cloud-based protection services.
- An on-premise WAF to stop all smart bot traffic that can bypass the other layers of protection.
7. Global Network Visibility and Control
Global visibility across the entire network at a very deep level allows organizations to control and fine-tune their DDoS protection lines of defense in real time and extend them across all their geographic regions, as needed. An example that demonstrates this is looking at how much visibility and control an organization has into protection monitoring and settings of their scrubbing center. You may be surprised to learn that there are different levels of visibility and control per specific vendors.
8. Not Just a Single Address, But a Range of Addresses
Effective DDoS solutions should protect not only individual addresses, but also the entire IP ranges and FQDN addresses list. This broader approach helps safeguard against attacks that target multiple addresses within a specific range.
Protecting a whole IP range should be done cautiously, as multiple types of online services can operate in the same IP range. For example, an organization might have API services (that are highly targeted) and customers’ web portals operating in the same subnet. Notwithstanding, it is a good approach to use DDoS protection on the entire IP range, if possible.
Research Carefully When Selecting a DDoS Mitigation Solution
Investing in comprehensive DDoS protection can transform your DDoS defense strategy from reactive to proactive, empowering your organization to stay ahead and resilient in the face of evolving cyber threats. If you are evaluating different DDoS protection solutions, focus on the key capabilities outlined in this article. A close assessment of these top capabilities is key to choosing a solution that will help you build a robust defense, ensure business continuity, and protect your critical assets.
Once you have the right DDoS protection solutions running, these can be tested continuously for DDoS vulnerabilities using MazeBolt’s RADAR DDoS Vulnerability Management solution. RADAR conducts continuous testing and simulation of your DDoS protection layers. It allows your organization to have visibility of all DDoS vulnerabilities (e.g., DDoS misconfigurations) in your deployed DDoS protection solutions – so that you can stop DDoS attacks, before they happen.
Interested in learning more? Speak with a MazeBolt expert today.
