Ways to protect against DDoS attack

In the current digital landscape, a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is akin to an incessant barrage against your online fortress’s gates. It’s a common yet potentially devastating method used by cyber attackers to disrupt the flow of traffic to your website. This blog post aims to demystify DDoS attacks and offer concrete steps you can take to protect your digital domain.

What is a DDoS Attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic to a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. DDoS attacks are carried out using multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. They can target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to ensuring information remains accessible.

How DDoS Attacks Work

DDoS attacks function by utilizing an army of compromised computers, also known as a botnet, to send a high volume of requests to a target’s IP address. With enough requests, the target is no longer able to process legitimate requests and thus becomes unavailable. The attacker can also exploit the complexity of DNS services by manipulating DNS records, or by attacking the DNS itself, which is a critical part of the web’s infrastructure responsible for translating domain names into IP addresses.

Ways to Mitigate DDoS Attacks

Protecting against DDoS attacks involves several strategies and solutions:

  • Utilize DNS Services: Implement robust DNS services that can handle high volumes of traffic and are resistant to DDoS attacks. Secondary DNS services can serve as a backup to the primary DNS service, providing redundancy.
  • Anycast DNS: Anycast DNS can distribute DNS requests among a network of servers in various locations, rather than just one. This disperses traffic across multiple points, making it harder for a DDoS attack to succeed.
  • Improve Network Security: This includes upgrading firewalls, switches, and routers that can help filter out malicious traffic before it reaches critical areas of the infrastructure.
  • DDoS Mitigation Tools: These are specialized solutions that can scrub traffic, singling out and blocking malicious packets, while allowing legitimate traffic to continue.

DDoS Attack vs. DoS Attack

While both DDoS and DoS (Denial of Service) attacks aim to disrupt service availability, the key difference lies in scale and origin. A DoS attack originates from a single Internet connection, while a DDoS attack comes from multiple sources and is often global, making it far more dangerous and challenging to mitigate.

Conclusion

In the digital age, DDoS attacks are a formidable threat to organizations of all sizes. By understanding what a DDoS attack is, how it operates, and the ways to mitigate such attacks, including leveraging DNS services and infrastructure, businesses can better prepare themselves against these digital onslaughts. It is not just about having the right tools, but also about understanding the intricacies of network traffic, DNS operations, and the difference between DDoS and simpler DoS scenarios.

DNS services explained in detail

DNS services are responsible for name resolution, routing emails, communication between IoT devices, CDN routing, and much more.

But what are they exactly? Let’s go into detail and explain the DNS services.

DNS (Domain Name System)

The DNS (Domain Name System) is a globally-distributed system for resolving domain names to IP addresses. It basically matches the hosts to their addresses and routes all the DNS queries.

Without it, it would be extremely hard to use the Internet. You would need to know all the IP addresses (IPv4 or IPv6) of the hosts you need to connect to.

DNS services explained

The DNS services are software that runs on DNS servers and allows you to manage your domain. You can purchase a plan for DNS services or use a Free DNS plan and manage your domain through it. Usually, the companies that offer such services will provide you with an easy-to-use interface for interacting with their service.

You can also rent servers and install DNS services on them, but it is more complicated.

DNS services allow you to fully manage your domain by adding and removing DNS records, adding and removing servers and zones, and more. Each DNS record type has its purpose: to point to a target, to announce a service, to route the traffic, etc.

You can have access to Primary and Secondary DNS servers. The Primary servers host the original DNS data, which you can modify on them. The Secondary just copy the data and serve to provide better and faster name resolution.

Not all DNS services are the same. Some DNS providers have a broad network of servers all around the world. That allows better DNS resolution, regardless of where the DNS queries are coming from.

Others focus on a particular region. For example, a DNS provider can concentrate on Asia, having more than 50% of their DNS servers there while almost neglecting the rest of the world. It could still be a good service if you are almost exclusively on the Asian market.

The DNS services strongly improve your uptime. Using a paid service, you will get access to multiple DNS servers. Even if one or two are down due to maintenance or cyber attack, you will still have more to answer the incoming queries.

When you check different providers, you will see many additional services. Let’s explain a few of them:

DDoS protection – Intelligent firewall that will protect you from DDoS attacks.

DNSSEC – additional features to encrypt the DNS queries and make them safer for your clients.

DDNS – Dynamic DNS for pointing your Dynamic IP address to a fixed name.

Load balancer – a method for managing the queries that improve network performance.

GeoDNS – load balancing based on the IP addresses of the visitors.

Reverse DNS – connects the IP address to a domain name and serves for verification.

Conclusion

DNS services help you host your DNS records and can provide better DNS resolution. You can also enjoy the benefit of multiple servers, additional and very useful features, and improved uptime.