Whether you’re an ISP, a government agency, a bank, or a healthcare provider, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll have to stop DDoS attacks. The question is what can you do before, during and after an attack to ensure your organization can safeguard its most prized digital assets.
Evaluating and selecting the best cyber-attack mitigation solution that fits the needs of your organization is a good place to start. Like any good business initiative, preparation, execution and evaluation will go a long way to prevent DDoS attacks in the future. To that end, organizations that understand the costs of a cyber-attack and develop a cyber-attack incident response plan are far more likely to limit potential damage and act in an effective manner compared to those that try to improvise their way through a cyber-attack-induced crisis.
How To Stop DDoS Attacks Before the Attack
To stop DDoS attacks, preparation is everything. Consider your policies and procedures concerning DDoS attack prevention, and ensure your defenses are up to par based on what you know. With cyberattacks likely to impact every business in some capacity, preparation for preventing DDoS attacks is a major step toward minimizing the financial, reputational and legal havoc an attack can wreak.
- First and foremost, understand that no organization is safe. According to Radware’s 2016-2017 Global Application & Network Security Report , 98% of organizations surveyed experienced a cyber-attack. Cyber-attacks are now a way of life.
- Make sure your detection and DDoS mitigation solutions are prepared to cover a wide range of attack types. From IoT botnets and volumetric assaults to SSL-based attacks, hackers have never had a larger arsenal to select from. Today, a sound DDoS defense typically encompasses a unified technology that integrates both on-premise and cloud-based mitigation and scrubbing, all managed via a single console and vendor.
- Make sure your security strategy is implemented into policies and procedures. Your staff should be prepared with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
How To Stop DDoS Attacks During the Attack
During an attack, the key is to minimize damage, execute your incident response plan, and communicate with key stakeholders, both internally and externally.
- Define the detection point, attack type(s) and attack tool(s) so your organization can decide on the best mitigation strategy.
- Don’t go it alone! Contact your DDoS vendor’s emergency response team to ensure the best decisions are being made. For example, in the event of a volumetric attack that threatens to saturate the Internet pipe, should inbound traffic be transferred to a scrubbing center?
- Hiding won’t help. If an attack occurs and business operations/access to web-based assets are degraded, communicate clearly with customers and internal stakeholders.
How To Stop DDoS Attacks After the Attack
Want to prevent DDoS attacks in the future? After the attack, it’s time to test, revise and adapt. What can you learn and what technologies and strategies can be implemented to stop DDoS attacks?
- First and foremost, don’t assume the attack is over.
- The threat landscape is a dynamic one. An incident response plan is never “complete.” After an attack, perform a damage control analysis. Review reports and forensics to learn what went wrong, what worked right.
- Optimize your security architecture. Evaluate and adopt technologies, policies and solution strategies that can help you fight future threats.
- To prevent a DDoS attack, practice makes perfect. Evaluate your organization’s response, and to ensure its rapid and decisive in the future, routinely stage “emergencies” and practice responding to them.
Thanks to the commoditization of attack tools via the Darknet and the increasing threat posed by the Internet of Things and botnets, DDoS attacks will continue to increase in sophistication and frequency. Perform on-going tests and evaluations of your systems and of the new technologies that are available in the market. Verify whether your organization could benefit from an out-of-path implementation for some of your detection tools and consider evaluating the implementation of a hybrid from our experts’ video series.