DDoS Protection: Why Your Security System Is Powerless Without It?
What is DDoS Attack?
DDOs attacks are considered a primary concern in internet security, and organizations are facing a huge amount of risk when dealing with it.
A distributed denial of service attack is a malicious attempt to divert the normal traffic of a particular server by overwhelming the target by a flood of internet traffic and preventing the regular traffic from arriving at the required destination. A survey conducted on small businesses revealed that attacks cost an average of $50,000 in total which was also a reason for reduced employee productivity, and lost revenue.
As per research, there is one DDoS attack launched every 23 seconds, considering this staggering number of attacks at such a quick pace it’s no wonder that your website is not secure out there on its own and can get hit at any time. It might even shrink further to less than 23 seconds before we even know.
DDoS protection has become an essential need for not only large businesses but also for small businesses that are on the path to becoming big companies soon. There were more than 7.5 million attacks only in 2017 which highlights the dire need for protection of DDos at this time.
Why are Traditional Methods not enough to deal with DDOs?
Protecting the attacks has become more than necessary now that the attackers are developing new and more sophisticated methods every day that can be used in more frequent attacks. These attacks don’t seem to slow down at any time soon and given the growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices the use of botnets seems to increase also. All of these botnets of devices will then be used to flood the victim’s servers with requests that will cause the system services unavailability.
Now that the DDoS attacks are increasing with no halting in sight for at least now it has become clear that to be protected from this threat we need some strong security and this is where the need for DDoS protection is felt. If your business is thriving then it’s legit to be worried about attacks because you never know when you are going to be hit. DDoS protection is the only option now to keep your website safeguard from attackers that aim to damage your business.
If most of the attacks do not overload the data transmission channel, the outdated solutions for mitigating the risk of attack cannot be effective. Because as an anomaly is detected the complete traffic of the system is redirected to the scrubbing devices. But from the initiating of the attack until the traffic passes from the scrubbing device the hacked system remains unprotected.
When the surge of anomalous traffic subsides the traffic of attacked hosts continues to pass from scrubbing devices and then take the normal route. This whole phenomenon or process is not automated. Network engineers analyze the traffic continuously. The system recovery takes 30-40 minutes depending on the depth of attack. Large organizations can face unavailability for several days.
The conclusion is that to use automated tools to handle the loss because the dependency on human intervention makes the organization vulnerable to damage within a seconds
Manual solutions vs Automated Technology
As we are expanding towards technology and automation DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly automated hackers often conduct it with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Most attackers start with a simple UDP packed then the second technique such as TCP flood is automatically enabled.
The automated attack technology helps the hackers in providing necessary information in real-time like the attack is successful or not. A manual reactive approach is not good enough in such cases because it adds inaccuracies to the process of recovery. This results in delays and incorrect, inefficient, and heavy system performance.
What is the Most Efficient Protection Solution?
There are more DDoS attacks than there ever been and it’s not only increasing but also evolving as well this is where DDos protection can help you with your business and make sure that your business keeps its head above the troubled water. DDoS protection can protect your business by regularly monitoring your servers for irregularities.
As we discussed earlier a DDoS attack might cost you $50k on average but that’s not the case always the number might go higher depending on your business and you lose a great deal of revenue in just a matter of hours. The DDoS protection services use rate-limiting at the time of the attack to avoid your server being overwhelmed by the response.Protection services also use filters to filter packets that are coming from suspicious sources at the router level.
These attacks can be devastating to organizations destroying them as a natural disaster. Be proactive and develop a protection plan based on your security because when a DDoS attack hits there is no time to think about what steps should be taken. One of the reasons for the attack is outdated systems so make sure that your system is up-to-date because outdated systems are usually the ones having the most loopholes and attackers find holes by installing new software versions that could be one of the ways to close more doors to the attackers.
Outsourcing DDoS prevention to cloud-based service providers can be helpful because the cloud has more bandwidth and resources than a private network. Other than this cloud-based apps are more secure because they can absorb harmful or malicious traffic before it reaches the desired destination.
Some of the ways to detect the attack include network slowdown and spotty connectivity if there is a lack of performance between these two the network is likely experiencing a DDoS attack.
Why Choose VPS for DDoS Attack Protection?
As we discussed earlier any online business can be the target of a DDoS attack at any time and to protect against it you might need if not terabytes of scalable bandwidth but at least gigabytes of bandwidth to cope with the DDoS attack.
If you are taking a hosting plan solely based on the plan then you might be more vulnerable to get your website shutdown in case of a DDoS attack because they provide only the resources to keep your website running under controlled environment but in case of any DDoS attacks, the hosting provider might take your website down to prevent the server from overloading.
At BlockDos we aim to protect your website from all sorts of volumetric attacks and recommend you the most suitable solution for DDoS protection and one of them is Virtual Private Server or DDoS-protected VPS plan which is better than the other shared hosting plan.
In our DDoS-protected VPS plan, we will monitor all your incoming traffic including your network traffic for any anomalies. In case of any DDoS attack, the mitigation system will identify and separate the attacking agents or bots from the real audience and block them to keep the system running smoothly and not only that but will keep the system open for the real audience to do business with you even at the time of the attack.
Automated attack always requires automated defense as It’s obvious that we can fight fire with fire. But protecting the organizations from DDOs attacks could require a huge amount of memory in gigabytes of on-demand bandwidth from the hosting provider of your website. By default, DDos protected VPS offers better DDos protection than any other option. Organizations that are facing continuous DDoS attacks can prevent the firm from using DDoS protected VPS. It is a virtual private server that includes DDoS mitigation. It is also referred to as a virtual server or virtual machine, which means that instead of a physical “dedicated DDoS protected server” you received a more capable and virtual slice of it. It requires a high capacity of bandwidth and hardware firewalls that are strong enough to stop any malicious attack before they can do any unexpected condition.
It is always a good idea to have a safe business from the start rather than suffering from a DDoS attack whilst in the midst of your journey towards success. So, a DDoS protected server is the best way to prepare for the worst-case scenario in advance.
GRE Tunnel
Generic routing encapsulation (GRE) is a communication protocol used to establish a direct, point-to-point connection between network nodes. GRE tunnel is simply a delivery system that is built to deliver the packets of data on the internet but for those packets that can not be transmitted over the public network itself.
There are numerous advantages of the GRE protocol such as,
- Use of multiple protocols over a single-protocol backbone
- Providing workarounds for networks with limited hops
- Connection of non-contiguous subnetworks
- Being less resource-demanding than its alternatives (e.g. IPsec VPN)
A GRE tunnel is established on a router level and has uniqueness depending on the hardware or the service that you are using. Typically you’ll be required to line up the tunnel interface IPs and supply public IP addresses for both ends of the GRE tunnel.
We establish a direct connection to our client’s servers using the GRE tunnel, once the BlockDos DDoS mitigation solution is deployed at the client network. The GRE allows us to send any type of data packets regardless of the attack that is launched on your network and by having this edge over the attacker we can protect your system from all types of DDoS attacks.
One of the other ways is to use GRE(Generic Routing Encapsulation) virtual Tunnel it can be considered as a protocol for wrapping data packets inside any secondary packet in order to set up a direct link By using the GRE protocol the traffic can easily be diverted into our network
GRE protocol offers you the end-to-end connection between any network. GRE protocol is also lightweight; it does not have any built-in encryption making it easy to configure.