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The fundamental problem in mitigating a DDoS attack is the inability to distinguish attack traffic from normal traffic. Being able to differentiate which traffic is legitimate and which is an attack is a core problem for DDoS attacks.
In the modern internet, DDoS traffic can appear in many different forms. A multi-vector DDoS attack uses multiple attack paths to disable a target in different ways. This also potentially complicates mitigation efforts.
A DNS amplification (Layer 3/4) combined with an HTTP flood (Layer 7) is an example of a multi-vector DDoS attack that simultaneously uses multiple protocol stacks. Mitigating a multi-vector DDoS attack requires the use of effective and diverse strategies.
Naturally, the more complex the attack, the more difficult it will be to separate attack traffic from normal traffic. At this point, the attacker’s aim is to make attack mitigation efforts inefficient by using as many vectors as possible. Mitigation attempts that involve indiscriminately dropping or limiting traffic will unfortunately also disable good traffic along with bad traffic, allowing the cyber attacker to achieve their goal.
A solution commonly used by all network administrators is to create a blackhole route. In this way, traffic is directed to the blackhole route and the systems remain operational. Datacentres or ISPs frequently use this method. Of course, this also causes legitimate traffic to be directed to the blackhole. However, it is frequently used to prevent other systems on the same network from being affected.
If you are experiencing a DDoS attack, an internet service provider (ISP) may send all traffic to your site into a blackhole for defensive purposes. This is not an ideal solution, as it effectively gives the attacker the desired target. However, the ISP or datacentre must protect its other customers and other systems on the same network.
Limiting the number of requests a server will accept within a certain time interval is an important way to reduce denial-of-service attacks. Rate limiting aims to slow down web scrapers (web scraping is a technique for extracting information from websites) from stealing content. It is also useful as a security solution to reduce brute-force login attempts. However, it will not be sufficient on its own to effectively address a complex DDoS attack.
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a security application that helps to mitigate DDoS attacks. By placing a WAF between the internet and the server, the targeted server can be protected against certain types of malicious traffic.
Filtering requests based on a set of rules used to identify DDoS tools can block Layer 7 attacks. One of the primary objectives of an effective WAF is the ability to rapidly apply custom rules in response to an attack.
This mitigation approach uses an Anycast network to distribute attack traffic to a network of distributed servers at the point where it is absorbed. This approach spreads the effect of distributed attack traffic to the point where it becomes manageable, leaving no destructive capability remaining.
The reliability of an Anycast network in mitigating a DDoS attack depends on the size of the attack, the size of the network and its efficiency.
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