As CIOs and CTOs are getting extremely worried about distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), here’s a brief article that can help to enlighten their mind on protecting their corporate networks, without the need of any professional help.
Running a DDoS Testing- It is essential, although it is a 3 hour effort to conduct. It can be done in two ways- hire a company to do it on your behalf or rent a cloud platform for three hours to test controlled attacks. The investment makes genuine sense and can pave way for a great ROI as it tracks down any configuration blunders that block mitigation.
Use the caching to the core- Maximize the usage of caching to help reduce the attack surface with a single setting change, irrespective of the cloud service like Akamai, CloudFlare, Imperva in use. As most of the corporate websites aren’t cashed and make static flow, hackers see these targets as easy pickings.
Prepare your response teams- Incident responders should be educated about the Ddos attack mitigation procedures well in advance. They should also be tested on how they distinguish between a server failure or a denial of service attack.
Double DNS Usage- Whenever a DDoS attack occurs on DNS Service, all your online systems will get disrupted. Maintaining a second DNS provider as a fail-over can help mitigate risks associated with DNS downtime, as one can take over the operations to keep the online services alive. After the 2016 DDoS attack on DYN and the 2018 Facebook service outage, most of the companies are insisting on using a double DNS.
Note- A distributed denial of service attack is a scenario where the web servers are constantly hit by fake web traffic, thus causing disruption and denial of service to actual traffic.
