What are the Common Types of Denial of Service Attacks?
If you’re running a business website, then, hopefully, you are already aware of the concept of denial of service attacks. You may, however, not be aware that there are actually different types of denial of service attacks. Understanding this, and incorporating this understanding into how you build and manage your IT infrastructure, can go a long way towards ensuring it keeps running smoothly.
Types of DoS Attacks (Denial of Service Attacks)
Depending on your point of view there are two or three types of denial of service attacks. These are denial of service attacks, distributed denial of service attacks, and unintended distributed denial of service attacks.
1. Denial of Service Attacks (DoS)
The basic version of a denial of service attack is simply one computer flooding a service with requests, usually from a spoofed IP address. These attacks are annoying, but they are also about as unsophisticated as it is possible to be and hence easily addressed.
2. Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)
DDoS attacks have become one of the major hazards of the internet, at least for anyone running a website, especially a business website. They come in two main forms. These are infrastructure level DDoS attacks (levels three and four of the OSI seven-layer model) and application-level DDoS attacks (levels six and seven of the OSI seven-layer model).
Infrastructure-level DDoS attacks are essentially much the same as old-school DoS attacks. The only real difference is that DDoS attacks use multiple computers in the attack, whereas plain DoS attacks only use one. This means that infrastructure-level DDoS attacks are a bit more of a challenge to resolve. Overall, however, they are still very unsophisticated and hence very easy to deal with.
Unintended Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
Application-level DDoS attacks are, however, quite another matter. These target high-value areas of a website such as its login page, its payment page, or its most important service. The underlying strategy is to flood that specific application with as much traffic as possible while avoiding detection.
Even when these attacks are detected, it is notoriously difficult to put a stop to them without losing genuine traffic.
Unintended distributed denial of service attacks
It's debatable whether or not these should be considered attacks since they are not deliberate. They do, however, display much the same characteristics as regular DDoS attacks so it's useful to be aware of them.
Unintended DDoS attacks are what happens when a website, or part of a website, gets an overwhelming surge in legitimate traffic. This winds up having the same effect as a DDoS attack. Unintended DDoS attacks often happen due to exposure on social media.
Ironically, this exposure can not only be entirely non-malicious, it can even be absolutely well-intentioned. An influencer may think that they're actually doing a brand a huge favor by "giving a shout out" to their products/services. Although this might not sound like much consolation while you are dealing with the impact, it may actually be a help to you over the long run.
One of the key differentiators between regular DDoS attacks and unintended DDoS attacks is that the former often originate in countries from which you wouldn’t expect to have traffic, whereas the latter generally comes from countries in which you have at least some kind of customer base.
Preparing for DoS attacks
You can’t really prevent DDoS attacks. They don’t rely on malware you can block or hacking skills you can block and/or detect. They simply ramp up traffic to your website and challenge you to handle it. This means that your anti-DoS strategy is to prepare for DoS attacks so you can keep your website running which you find and block the source. There are three key parts to this.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is your friend for so many reasons. In the context of DoS attacks, the more bandwidth you have at your disposal, the more traffic you can absorb before it becomes a problem. This gives you more time to find and fix the issue.
A website vulnerability scanner (and DDoS mitigation service)
Different website vulnerability scanner have different functions, but any decent one should have an anti-malware scanner and a web-applications firewall. In the case of DoS attacks, it’s the latter you need. You might also want to consider signing up for a DDoS mitigation service. These are similar to regular firewalls but they are designed specifically with DDoS attacks in mind (whereas regular firewalls are generic) so they filter traffic much more quickly.
Flexible, scalable architecture
Ideally, you should use services such as smart DNS lookup, content distribution networks, and load balancers to help create flexible, scalable architecture, which is resistant to DoS attacks.
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