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How to protect against DDoS attacks

  • By Gcore
  • May 14, 2021
  • 7 min read
How to protect against DDoS attacks

DDoS attacks are happening more often. The number of “smart attacks” is also increasing, and their duration and capacity are growing. Protecting your online resources is becoming increasingly harder.

In this article, we’ll provide tips on how to effectively protect against increasingly complex DDoS attacks.

What are DDoS attacks?

DDoS attacks are any actions by cybercriminals aimed at making your services inaccessible to clients. There are different ways to do this. The most common is to send a huge number of requests to the server so that it stops coping with them, causing it to work very slowly or crash altogether. But there are other methods as well.

Attackers can attack a single site, application, or entire server.

There are many types of DDoS attacks. They can target different OSI layers and use different techniques.

During a DDoS attack, criminals find vulnerabilities and can, for example, launch a virus on a website and steal your data or the data of your customers.

How do DDoS attacks harm businesses?

The primary harm of a DDoS attack is that your service becomes unavailable for a while. Customers can’t access a website or application and therefore can’t use your services. As a result, they become less loyal to your business.

Worst of all, attackers often attack at critical moments. For example, you’ve launched a promotion on your online store and you expect it to result in a substantial sales growth. But instead of “clean” traffic, a huge number of requests from bots is sent to the server, and real people can’t access the website and make a purchase.

Aside from this, there are other negative aspects:

  • If bot requests account for a certain percentage of traffic to your website, it’s difficult to estimate the amount of real traffic. This means you won’t be able to know how appealing and user-friendly your website or application is for real customers, and how often they visit.
  • Bot requests increase the bounce rate. This worsens the position of your website in the search engine results.
  • If you use paid traffic to attract customers, some of this traffic may not be “real”, causing you to waste part of your budget.

GitHub attack

In early March 2018, the most powerful DDoS attack in history hit GitHub, setting a new record of 1.35 Tbps, or 126.9 million packets per second. Attackers had learned to use Memcached DDoS servers for amplification, which can amplify the attack by more than 50,000 times.

EVE Online attack

In February 2020, a powerful DDoS attack that lasted more than a week completely paralyzed gameplay: chats, ship control, and market transactions were impossible.

Takeaway.com attack

In March 2020, there was a major DDoS attack on the Takeaway.com food delivery network. Restaurants could receive orders, but couldn’t process them.

The attackers demanded 2 bitcoins from the company as payment to stop the DDoS attack. On the same day, the CEO tweeted a screenshot of their message.

Takeaway chose not to pay the ransom, but the DDoS attack itself caused serious damage. They had to provide refunds to all users whose orders were paid but not delivered.

Why do criminals carry out DDoS attacks?

The reasons vary.

Extortion

We’ve already given an example above. Events often proceed in two possible ways:

  1. You’re warned in advance. The attackers promise to attack your websites if you don’t pay them a certain amount by a specified date.
  2. You are first attacked, and then a message comes with a request demanding payment to stop the DDoS attack.

If a ransom is demanded from you, you should never pay anything! Criminals will think you give in easily, and they will do it again and again.

Unscrupulous competition

You are actively growing, eventually overtaking your competitors, and one of them envies you. Or maybe you are going to enter new markets, and the companies already there don’t want extra competition.

In any market, there are those who don’t like to play fair. With the help of a DDoS attack, they can try to ruin your business and force you to abandon your plans.

What should you do in this case? Again, don’t give in to the attackers. If your competitors fear you and try to stop you, it means you are moving in the right direction.

In addition to intentional attacks, there are also unintentional ones:

  • You are collateral damage. This can happen if your hosting is located on a virtual server. Another website may have been the target of the criminals, but since a DDoS attack affects the entire server, everyone else suffers too.
  • It wasn’t an attack at all. You simply didn’t anticipate natural surges in traffic, such as due to sales, and the system couldn’t cope with the influx.

How do you know if your resource has been attacked?

DDoS attacks are usually unexpected. You didn’t offer any promotions or sales. You did nothing to attract customers. And yet for no reason, a huge number of requests are sent to the server. A normal surge in traffic, as opposed to an attack, is usually predictable.

You can check if this is a DDoS attack by analyzing the logs. These are files that are stored on the server’s hard drive. They record information about visitors, transmitted data, and error messages.

Access to the logs is usually granted by the hosting provider via the control panel.

If your resource is under attack, you’ll probably see that a lot of identical requests and packets are coming from the same IP addresses.

How to protect yourself against DDoS attacks on your own?

Let’s be clear: you won’t be able to set up full-fledged protection on your own. There’s no free technique that is guaranteed to protect your website or application. New DDoS attacks appear all the time, and the existing ones get better every day.

But you can still do something.

Prepare for the load

During the New Year’s sale, your website was “crashed” at the most crucial moment. Was it really a DDoS attack?

If you have a competent infrastructure, a balanced load distribution is provided, and possible traffic surges are taken into account, then DDoS attacks won’t be such a threat to you. Invest in infrastructure. It’s better to make one good investment than to scrimp and then suffer losses many times.

If you have no resources to build your own infrastructure, consider purchasing a third-party IT solution. One option is to sign up for a CDN—a content delivery network.

The Gcore CDN delivers any heavy content around the world. It’s a fast and secure network with over 70 points of presence on all continents, as well as a spot in the Guinness World Records.

You are under attack right now. What do you do?

If you’re being attacked, and you haven’t set up any protection for your website, there are several actions that you can take.

1. Ban the IP addresses from which the attack is carried out. They can be found in the logs.

To avoid manually blocking each request, you can use grep. It’s a tool that allows you to find certain elements in a file and perform simple actions with them—for example, block.

You will be very lucky if the attack on your website is short. In this case, you can figure out right away where the “junk” traffic originated, allowing you to block it.

But such luck is rare. A DDoS attack can last for several days and stem from thousands of different IP addresses. It’s not possible to block them all, even using grep.

Besides, stopping smart attacks by blocking IP addresses isn’t a very effective tactic. If the perpetrators use dynamic IP addresses, then no block can save you.

2. Block requests by geolocation. This method works only if you see that a lot of requests to your website come from a specific area of the world. For example, your users live in Eastern Europe, but suddenly a huge amount of traffic comes from Africa.

But once again, this is rare. Most DDoS attacks these days are “smart”, and attackers most likely won’t make such a mistake.

3. Block the “heavy” section of your website. The attack may be aimed not at the entire website, but at the most vulnerable part of it, such as the search feature. If it’s not the most important element of your website, you can simply disable access to it for all users. Customers may not be able to use search, but everything else will function normally.

The drawback to this method is that it’s useless for most attacks.

Why are these methods often ineffective?

These methods can help stop some simple types of DDoS attacks. Besides, all of them are designed to repel attacks on servers and will in no way rid you of bots on the website, which can also cause big problems.

For instance, if you have a limited number of products, an attacker can launch bots that will add all the products to their carts, preventing real users from buying anything.

On top of that, even if you manage to repel the attack, you’ll have spent time solving the problem. That means your services will be unavailable for some time.

In order to avoid frantically taking emergency measures, it’s better to buy hosting with built-in protection against DDoS attacks from the very beginning or to enable paid protection against DDoS attacks for your server.

Benefits of using a specialized service to protect against DDoS attacks

1. Protection at all layers. A DDoS attack can occur at the network (L3), transport (L4), or application (L7) layers. The methods listed above will help in the event of a DDoS attack at one layer. But attacks are different. And it is extremely difficult to protect all layers on your own.

Professional protection is a well-designed filtering platform that all traffic passes through and that blocks suspicious requests. “Junk” data packets will be stopped on the way to the resource.

2. Load balancing. A good security system usually provides for an even distribution of traffic between nodes. This makes it harder for criminals to “crash” your website. Additionally, it will also speed up the loading of the website and help with natural traffic surges.

3. Protection of web application vulnerabilities. Any website or app has weak spots, and attackers don’t hesitate to exploit them. They detect vulnerabilities and exploit them to gain access to confidential user data.

Web Application Firewall is a firewall that hides application vulnerabilities and blocks suspicious traffic.

When choosing a firewall, it’s important to pay attention to how it works. It is a good idea to choose a “smart” WAF with self-learning algorithms. Such screens are able to analyze the contents of packets and avoid blocking real customers along with bots.

4. Refund guarantee. If you are securing your website with whatever tools are available, there is no guarantee that these tools will help. And even if your own protection has more or less coped for now, tomorrow hackers may invent a new type of DDoS attack and your methods will be useless.

On the other hand, if you purchase professional protection, good companies always provide a refund guarantee for their services. If the protection doesn’t work, you can get your money back.

At the same time, professional systems are constantly evolving and taking into account the emergence of new DDoS attacks.

How does Gcore protect customers against DDoS attacks?

We offer protection for websites and applications from bots and secure hosting on our servers. We can also enable server protection for your own infrastructure.

The protection solution is based on our own traffic filtering centers in Europe. The total filtering bandwidth is more than 1.5 Tbps.

How does it work?

  1. The filtration centers make all traffic go through them. The centers analyze the traffic along the way.
  2. Not only are packets checked, but also the behavioral factors of the person who sent the request. For example, the system analyzes how much time the user spent on the website, as well as the intervals between requests and sub-requests.
  3. This data is compared with the parameters to determine whether the request is legitimate or not. Simply put, the system calculates whether a real person or a bot visited your website.
  4. If the request seems suspicious, it’s blocked.

The system blocks any bot traffic, including parsing and brute-force.

It blocks sessions, not IP addresses. Self-learning algorithms are built into the platform. It remembers “trustworthy” customers and doesn’t verify subsequent requests from them. The false positive rate is less than 0.01%.

The advantages of our Protection

  • We block DDoS attacks from the first request.
  • We ensure load balancing.
  • You pay only for legitimate traffic. We don’t charge for 5% of surges, which means you won’t have to pay for natural surges, such as during promotions.
  • We provide reports.
  • We guarantee the availability of your websites by 99.5%. We’ll refund the money if the protection doesn’t work.
  • To enable protection, you just need to set up a DNS record.

In addition to protection, you can buy a smart firewall for your web application.

Protect your resources with a comprehensive solution and forget about DDoS attacks.

Get a free consultation

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What is a DDoS attack?

A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is a type of cyberattack in which a hacker overwhelms a server with an excessive number of requests, causing the server to stop functioning properly. This can cause the website, app, game, or other online service to become slow, unresponsive, or completely unavailable. DDoS attacks can result in lost customers and revenue for the victim. DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common, with a 46% increase in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.How do DDoS attacks work?DDoS attacks work by overwhelming and flooding a company’s resources so that legitimate users cannot get through. The attacker creates huge amounts of malicious traffic by creating a botnet, a collection of compromised devices that work together to carry out the attack without the device owners’ knowledge. The attacker, referred to as the botmaster, sends instructions to the botnet in order to implement the attack. 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These layers come from the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model, the foundational framework for network communication that describes how different systems and devices connect and communicate. This model has seven layers. DDoS attacks seek to exploit vulnerabilities across three of them: L3, L4, and L7.While all three types of attacks have the same end goal, they differ in how they work and which online resources they target. L3 and L4 DDoS attacks target servers and infrastructure, while L7 attacks affect the app itself.Volumetric attacks (L3) overwhelm the network equipment, bandwidth, or server with a high volume of traffic.Connection protocol attacks (L4) target the resources of a network-based service, like website firewalls or server operating systems.Application layer attacks (L7) overwhelm the network layer, where the application operates with many malicious requests, which leads to application failure.1. Volumetric attacks (L3)L3, or volumetric, DDoS attacks are the most common form of DDoS attack. They work by flooding internal networks with malicious traffic, aiming to exhaust bandwidth and disrupt the connection between the target network or service and the internet. By exploiting key communication protocols, attackers send massive amounts of traffic, often with spoofed IP addresses, to overwhelm the victim’s network. As the network equipment strains to process this influx of data, legitimate requests are delayed or dropped, leading to service degradation or even complete network failure.2. Connection protocol attacks (L4)Protocol attacks occur when attackers send connection requests from multiple IP addresses to target server open ports. One common tactic is a SYN flood, where attackers initiate connections without completing them. This forces the server to allocate resources to these unfinished sessions, quickly leading to resource exhaustion. As these fake requests consume the server’s CPU and memory, legitimate traffic is unable to get through. Firewalls and load balancers managing incoming traffic can also be overwhelmed, resulting in service outages.3. Application layer attacks (L7)Application layer attacks strike at the L7 layer, where applications operate. Web applications handle everything from simple static websites to complex platforms like e-commerce sites, social media networks, and SaaS solutions. In an L7 attack, a hacker deploys multiple bots or machines to repeatedly request the same resource until the server becomes overwhelmed.By mimicking genuine user behavior, attackers flood the web application with seemingly legitimate requests, often at high rates. For example, they might repeatedly submit incorrect login credentials or overload the search function by continuously searching for products. As the server consumes its resources managing these fake requests, genuine users experience slow response times or may be completely denied access to the application.How can DDoS attacks be prevented?To stay one step ahead of attackers, use a DDoS protection solution to protect your web resources. A mitigation solution detects and blocks harmful DDoS traffic sent by attackers, keeping your servers and applications safe and functional. If an attacker targets your server, your legitimate users won’t notice any change—even during a considerable attack—because the protection solution will allow safe traffic while identifying and blocking malicious requests.DDoS protection providers also give you reports on attempted DDoS attacks. This way, you can track when the attack happened, as well as the size and scale of the attack. This enables you to respond effectively, analyze the potential implications of the attack, and implement risk management strategies to mitigate future disruptions.Repel DDoS attacks with GcoreAt Gcore, we offer robust and proven security solutions to protect your business from DDoS attacks. Gcore DDoS Protection provides comprehensive mitigation at L3, L4, and L7 for websites, apps, and servers. We also offer L7 protection as part of Gcore WAAP, which keeps your web apps and APIs secure against a range of modern threats using AI-enabled threat detection.Take a look at our recent Radar report to learn more about the latest DDoS attack trends and the changing strategies and patterns of cyberattacks.Read our DDoS Attack Trends Radar report

How to Spot and Stop a DDoS Attack

The faster you detect and resolve a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, the less damage it can do to your business. Read on to learn how to identify the signs of a DDoS attack, differentiate it from other issues, and implement effective protection strategies to safeguard your business. You’ll also discover why professional mitigation is so important for your business.The Chronology of a DDoS AttackThe business impact of a DDoS attack generally increases the longer it continues. While the first few minutes might not be noticeable without a dedicated solution with monitoring capabilities, your digital services could be taken offline within an hour. No matter who your customer is or how you serve them, every business stands to lose customers, credibility, and revenue through downtime.The First Few Minutes: Initial Traffic SurgeAttackers often start with a low-volume traffic flow to avoid early detection. This phase, known as pre-flooding, evaluates the target system’s response and defenses. You may notice a slight increase in traffic, but it could still be within the range of normal fluctuations.Professional DDoS mitigation services use algorithms to spot these surges, identify whether the traffic increase is malicious, and stop attacks before they can have an impact. Without professional protection, it’s almost impossible to spot this pre-flooding phase, leading you into the following phases of an attack.The First Hour: Escalating TrafficThe attack will quickly escalate, resulting in a sudden and extreme increase in traffic volume. During this stage, network performance will start to degrade noticeably, causing unusually slow loading times for websites and services.Look out for network disconnections, or unusually slow performance. These are telltale signs of a DDoS attack in its early stages.The First Few Hours: Service DisruptionAs the attack intensifies, the website may become completely inaccessible. You might experience an increased volume of spam emails as part of a coordinated effort to overwhelm your systems. Frequent loss of connectivity within the local network can occur as the attack overloads the infrastructure.You can identify this stage by looking for website or network unavailability. Users will experience continuous problems when trying to connect to the targeted application or server.Within 24 Hours: Sustained ImpactIf the attack continues, the prolonged high traffic volume will cause extended service outages and significant slowdowns. By this point, it is clear that a DDoS attack is in progress, especially if multiple indicators are present simultaneously.By now, not only is your website and/or network unavailable, but you’re also at high risk of data breaches due to the loss of control of your digital resources.Distinguishing DDoS Attacks from Other IssuesWhile DDoS attack symptoms like slow performance and service outages are common, they can also be caused by other problems. Here’s how to differentiate between a DDoS attack and other issues:AspectDDoS attackHosting problemsLegitimate traffic spikeSoftware issuesTraffic volumeSudden, extreme increaseNo significant increaseHigh but expected during peaksNormal, higher, lower, or zeroService responseExtremely slow or unavailableSlow or intermittentSlower but usually functionalErratic, with specific errorsError messagesFrequent Service UnavailableInternal Server Error, TimeoutNo specific errors, slower responsesSpecific to the softwareDurationProlonged, until mitigatedVaries, often until resolvedTemporary, during peaks, often predictableVaries based on the bugSource of trafficMultiple, distributed, malicious signaturesConsistent with normal traffic, localizedGeographically diverse, consistent patternsDepends on the user baseProtective Strategies Against DDoS AttacksPrevention is the best defense against DDoS attacks. Here are some strategies to protect your business:Content delivery networks (CDNs): CDNs distribute your traffic across multiple servers worldwide, reducing the load on any single server and mitigating the impact of DDoS attacks.DDoS protection solutions: These services provide specialized tools to detect, mitigate, and block DDoS attacks. They continuously monitor traffic patterns in real time to detect anomalies and automatically respond to and stop attacks without manual intervention.Web application and API protection (WAAP): WAAP solutions protect web applications and APIs from a wide range of threats, including DDoS attacks. They use machine learning and behavioral analysis to detect and block sophisticated attacks, from DDoS assaults to SQL injections.Gcore provides all three protection strategies in a single platform, offering your business the security it needs to thrive in a challenging threat landscape.Don’t Delay, Protect Your Business NowGcore provides comprehensive DDoS protection, keeping your services online and your business thriving even during an attack. Explore Gcore DDoS Protection or get instant protection now.Discover the latest DDoS trends and threats in our H3 2023 report

Improve Your Privacy and Data Security with TLS Encryption on CDN

The web is a public infrastructure: Anyone can use it. Encryption is a must to ensure that communications over this public infrastructure are secure and private. You don’t want anyone to read or modify the data you send or receive, like credit card information when paying for an online service.TLS encryption is a basic yet crucial safeguard that ensures only the client (the user’s device, like a laptop) and server can read your request and response data; third parties are locked out. You can run TLS on a CDN for improved performance, caching, and TLS management. If you want to learn more about TLS and how running it on a CDN can improve your infrastructure, this is the right place to start.What Is TLS Encryption and Why Does It Matter?TLS, transport layer security, encrypts data sent via the web to prevent it from being seen or changed while it’s in transit. For that reason, it’s called encryption in-transit technology. TLS is also commonly called HTTPS when used with HTTP or SSL, as previous versions of the technology were based on it. TLS ensures high encryption performance and forward secrecy. To learn more about encryption, check out our dedicated article.TLS is a vital part of the web because it ensures trust for end users and search engines alike. End users can rest assured that their data—like online banking information or photos of their children—can’t be accessed. Search engines know that information protected by TLS is trustworthy, so they rate it higher than non-protected content.What’s the Connection Between TLS and CDN?A CDN, or content delivery network, helps improve your website’s performance by handling the delivery of your content from its own servers rather than your website’s server. When a CDN uses TLS, it ensures that your content is encrypted as it travels from your server to the CDN and from the CDN to your users.With TLS offloading, your server only needs to encrypt the content for each CDN node, not for every individual user. This reduces the workload on your server.Here’s a simple breakdown of how it works:Your server encrypts the content once and sends it to the CDN.The CDN caches this encrypted content.When a user requests the content, the CDN serves it directly to them, handling all encryption and reducing the need to repeatedly contact your server.Without a CDN, your server would have to encrypt and send content to each user individually, which can slow things down. With a CDN, your server encrypts the content once for the CDN. The CDN then takes over, encrypting and serving the content to all users, speeding up the process and reducing the load on your server.Figure 1: Comparison of how content is served with TLS on the web server (left) vs on CDN (right)Benefits of “Offloading” TLS to a CDNOffloading TLS to a CDN can improve your infrastructure with improved performance, better caching, and simplified TLS management.Increased PerformanceWhen establishing a TLS connection, the client and server must exchange information to negotiate a session key. This exchange involves four messages being sent over the network, as shown in Figure 2. The higher the latency between the two participants, the longer it takes to establish the connection. CDN nodes are typically closer to the client, resulting in lower latency and faster connection establishment.As mentioned above, CDN nodes handle all the encryption tasks. This frees up your server’s resources for other tasks and allows you to simplify its code base.Figure 2: TLS handshakeImproved CachingIf your data is encrypted, the CDN can’t cache it. A single file will look different from the CDN nodes for every new TLS connection, eliminating the CDN benefits (Figure 3). If the CDN holds the certificates, it can negotiate encryption with the clients and collect the files from your server in plaintext. This allows the CDN to cache the content efficiently and serve it faster to users.Figure 3: TLS and CDN caching comparedSimplified TLS ManagementThe CDN takes care of maintenance tasks such as certificate issuing, rotation, and auto-renewal. With the CDN managing TLS, your server’s code base can be simplified, and you no longer need to worry about potential TLS updates in the future.TLS Encryption with Gcore CDNWith the Gcore CDN we don’t just take care of your TLS encryption, but also file compression and DNS lookups. This way, you can unburden your servers from non-functional requirements, which leads to smaller, easier-to-maintain code bases, lower CPU, memory, and traffic impact, and a lower workload for the teams managing those servers.Gcore CDN offers two TLS offloading options:Free Let’s Encrypt certificates with automatic validation, an effective and efficient choice for simple security needsPaid custom certificates, ideal if your TLS setup has more complex requirementsHow to Enable HTTPS with a Free Let’s Encrypt CertificateSetting up HTTPS for your website is quick, easy, and free. First, make sure you have a Gcore CDN resource for your website. If you haven’t created one yet, you can do so in the Gcore Customer Portal by clicking Create CDN resource in the top-right of the window (Figure 4) and following the setup wizard. You’ll be asked to update your DNS records so they point to the Gcore CDN, allowing Gcore to issue the certificates later.Figure 4: Create CDN resourceNext, open the resource settings by selecting your CDN resource from the list in the center (Figure 5).Figure 5: Select the CDN resourceEnable HTTPS in the resource settings, as shown in Figure 6:Select SSL in the left navigationClick the Enable HTTPS checkboxClick Get SSL certificateFigure 6: Get an SSL certificateYour certificate will usually be issued within 30 minutes.Our Commitment to Online SecurityAt Gcore, we’re committed to making the internet secure for everyone. As part of this mission, we offer free CDN and free TLS certificates. Take advantage and protect your resources efficiently for free!Get TLS encryption on Gcore CDN free

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