Find answers to the most common questions about DDoS and our solutions. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, ask one of our DDoS specialists!
DDoS vulnerabilities are weaknesses or misconfigurations in your network infrastructure that can be exploited during a DDoS attack. These vulnerabilities allow attackers to overwhelm your systems with traffic, causing downtime and disrupting services. Identifying and addressing DDoS vulnerabilities is critical because even a brief outage can lead to significant financial loss, reputational damage, and operational disruption for your organization.
The best way to identify DDoS vulnerabilities is through continuous DDoS testing, which assesses your network for any weaknesses that could be exploited in an attack. Traditional DDoS protection solutions do not offer continuous DDoS testing; instead, they provide periodic assessments – typically, a couple of times a year. In contrast, MazeBolt’s RADAR platform performs non-disruptive DDoS simulations on live environments, helping to uncover DDoS vulnerabilities in your defense layers. This proactive approach allows you to identify and fix weak spots before they can be exploited by real attackers.
Many organizations rely on static or outdated DDoS protections that may not adapt to evolving attack methods. Misconfigurations in DDoS defenses or gaps in coverage can leave your systems exposed. Additionally, without continuous DDoS testing, new vulnerabilities can emerge unnoticed. MazeBolt’s RADAR solution ensures continuous DDoS vulnerability management to keep your defenses strong and up to date, reducing the risk of an attack.
Periodic red team assessments:
In other words, because periodic assessments leave gaps between tests, organizations are left vulnerable to the new DDoS vulnerabilities that arise. In contrast, continuous DDoS testing ensures that your network is regularly monitored for weaknesses and provides ongoing protection. MazeBolt’s RADAR platform works in real time to identify, report, and help remediate vulnerabilities, ensuring your organization is always prepared to defend against new and evolving DDoS threats.
MazeBolt’s RADAR platform runs thousands of non-disruptive attack simulations, finding weaknesses across all defense layers. By continuously monitoring and updating your DDoS protections, RADAR ensures that your organization remains resilient to DDoS attacks, reducing the likelihood of downtime and service disruption.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack refers to a malicious player that disturbs the regular flow of traffic to a specific server, service, or network. This disruption is caused by inundating the target or its connected infrastructure with excessive Internet traffic. DDoS attacks are harnessed by utilizing numerous compromised computer systems as sources of the attacking traffic. These compromised systems can encompass traditional computers and other interconnected resources like Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
At a conceptual level, a DDoS attack bears resemblance to an unanticipated traffic congestion that congests a highway, impeding the regular progression of traffic towards its intended destination.
One of the primary challenges in identifying a DDoS attack lies in the familiarity of its symptoms. Many of these indicators closely resemble the experiences of regular technology users, such as sluggish upload or download speeds, websites becoming temporarily unavailable, intermittent internet connectivity, unusual content or media, or an upsurge in spam. Additionally, the duration and intensity of a DDoS attack can vary significantly, ranging from a few hours to several weeks. This is what is referred to as downtime.
DDoS attacks are executed through networks comprising interconnected, Internet-enabled machines. These networks encompass computers and various devices (including Internet of Things devices) that have been compromised by malware, enabling remote control by an attacker. These individual compromised devices are termed “bots” or “zombies,” while a collection of such bots forms a “botnet.” Once a botnet is established, the attacker can orchestrate an assault by issuing remote commands to each bot within the network.
Upon targeting a victim’s server or network, each bot within the botnet sends requests to the target’s specific IP address. This onslaught of requests has the potential to overwhelm the server or network, resulting in a denial of service for legitimate traffic. The intricacy arises from the fact that each bot in the botnet is a genuine internet-connected device. Thus, distinguishing between the malicious attack traffic and the normal traffic becomes a complex task.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aim to disrupt the normal functioning of a website by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic. These attacks target various critical levels of a website’s infrastructure, exploiting vulnerabilities in different components to render the website inaccessible to legitimate users. Here’s how DDoS attacks target these critical levels:
| Component | Impact of DDoS Attack |
| DNS Services | By targeting DNS services with a flood of requests, attackers can prevent the resolution of domain names into IP addresses, making the website inaccessible even if the web servers are operational.
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| Load Balancers | Overwhelming load balancers can prevent them from distributing traffic efficiently, causing service degradation or total failure.
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| Data Centers and ISP Connectivity | Attacking the infrastructure hosting the website or its connectivity to the Internet can isolate the website from its users.
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No. RADAR™ testing is based on a revolutionary, patented, non-disruptive DDoS testing technology that has ZERO impact on ongoing operations. It is an automated solution that runs on live production environments at pre-scheduled time periods.
Yes. RADAR testing checks production environments automatically against over 140 types of DDoS attack vectors, from layers 3 (network), 4 (transport), and 7 (Application) attacks.
RADAR testing assists organizations in identifying and continually eliminating their DDoS vulnerability gap – bringing it down to as little as 2%.
MazeBolt’s professional services include some of the top DDoS experts worldwide. Many of them joined MazeBolt with backgrounds working for other leading DDoS mitigation companies. MazeBolt’s professional services include –
MazeBolt RADAR testing can run from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of DDoS attack simulations a year. It can do this comfortably because it is a patented technology that is non-disruptive to IT operations. Business continuity is maintained during RADAR’s DDoS attack simulations.
MazeBolt provides remediation guidance & planning. Every DDoS vulnerability discovered by RADAR has all the data required to close the gap by fine-tuning relevant DDoS mitigation policies. For example, RADAR logs the volume of attack simulations sent and attack traffic received, together with other important reporting parameters. This information allows the DDoS mitigation vendor to implement an optimized policy change for each vulnerability discovered.
RADAR outlines the steps of DDoS mitigation, including identification, response, and routing, to differentiate between legitimate high-volume traffic and attacks.
Despite the deployment of sophisticated mitigation solutions, companies typically face a 48% DDoS vulnerability level. This is primarily because these solutions are reactive rather than proactive. RADAR provides continuous, non-disruptive testing across all OSI layers to identify and help remediate DDoS vulnerabilities before an attack occurs. RADAR simulation reports are used by security teams and mitigation partners to remediate DDoS vulnerabilities.
Two types of reporting are available: continuous and on-demand. A DDoS Vulnerabilities (or DDoS Mitigation Gaps) report can be generated at any time. MazeBolt refers to this as a Vendor Report. Additionally, MazeBolt’s customers receive a quarterly, executive report with high-level risk quantification and reduction recommendations.
RADAR Vendor Reports include a comprehensive picture of what took place during a particular DDoS attack simulation. For example, on a per attack simulation basis, the vendor can see:
Yes. The RADAR testing platform user interface has a wealth of information on all DDoS attack simulations, for example:
Generally speaking, DDoS attacks start at a default of 25 Mbps (for Layers 3 & 4) and work their way up to a maximal bandwidth of 500 Mbps. This may vary depending on the DDoS mitigation vendor SLA.
RADAR testing reads the metadata generated from RADAR testing nodes. All other traffic is ignored. Customers receive a full security spec of metadata collection and other security standards in effect.
No. RADAR testing does not read PII.
This depends on the DDoS protections deployed:
MazeBolt identifies simulated attack traffic by looking for and filtering the traffic’s source IPs. In a default configuration, we only capture traffic originating from MazeBolt source IPs.
For CDN-based traffic, this will turn the RADAR detector into a mode whereby we begin capturing all traffic, identifying the true source IP in the X-Forward-For header, and then using those statistics to send out. It is important to note that we only send out traffic statistics, and NO PII information or any other data other than TCP-related data, which is sent out via our secure API (which uses 2-factor authentication and only communicates with our data center).
RADAR can test hybrid DDoS mitigation deployments simultaneously.
RADAR testing requires a TAP (Mirror) Port immediately downstream from each DDoS mitigation solution.
Yes, we do, but only for RADAR testing customers. We do not offer stand–alone Red Team DDoS testing.
