Types of DDoS Attacks and How to Prevent Them

Of all the cyberthreats, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and their types are among the most insidious and widespread. According to a report, 2022 saw a 74% increase in the number of DDoS attacks when compared to previous years. Even at a nascent stage, organizations should take steps to prevent DDoS attacks. DDoS protection is important as it enables malicious actors to flood a network with traffic causing it to shut down permanently or temporarily. Overloading of traffic disrupts connectivity, disabling legitimate users from visiting your website.

Fundamentally, a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack is a cybercrime where hackers aim to crash a network or server by overloading it with fake traffic. The unforeseen spike in messages, connection requests, or data packets overwhelms the targeted system causing it to slow or shut down. The motive of the perpetrators or hacktivists of different types of DDoS attacks is often to swamp the target’s network or system with requests in order to impede business operations or render the website/application inaccessible to its intended users.

Other motives can include manipulating targets into paying a hefty ransom, disrupting service for professional rivalry, hampering brand image, or distracting the incident response team to attempt a bigger attack. These attacks have evolved over the years, which makes them harder to defend against. However, with the right strategy and a comprehensive understanding of these attacks, you can mitigate their impact. This can further lead to other forms of cybercrimes like phishing and spoofing, which can be mitigated if you use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

In this article, we’ll take you through various types of DDoS attacks and strategies to safeguard your digital assets and maintain uninterrupted business operations in today’s hyper-connected world. The impact of an IP DDoS attack can be significant, including lost revenue, damaged reputation, and even legal liability. Furthermore, the frequency and intensity of these attacks are rising, making it crucial for network administrators and security professionals to understand their nature and consequences.

Various Types of DDoS Attacks

While the basic premise of all DDoS attacks is the same, that is, to clog the victim’s IT infrastructure with traffic and hinder operations, they can be executed in various ways. These different types of DDoS attacks are classified according to the network connection layers they target, which can significantly alter the way they are detected and defended against. They typically fall into three main categories: Volumetric Attacks, Protocol Attacks, and Application Layer Attacks.

• Volumetric Attacks: These aim to consume all available bandwidth between the target and the wider internet. They decrease your website’s bandwidth using amplification techniques. It’s hard to detect this as the traffic appears to come from multiple IP addresses. Examples include UDP floods and ICMP floods.
• Protocol Attacks: These focus on consuming server resources or the resources of intermediate communication equipment like firewalls and load balancers. Examples include SYN floods and Ping of Death attacks.
• Application Layer Attacks: These target specific applications or services by exploiting vulnerabilities (like SIP, voice services, BGP) or overwhelming them with seemingly legitimate requests, disabling the application’s ability to deliver content. HTTP floods are a common example.

Some common examples of specific DDoS attack types and their real-life examples include:

CLDAP Reflection Attack

A CLDAP Reflection Attack is one of the most common and fatal types of DDoS attacks, with the impact of new exploits shooting up to 70 times the recent years. The attack targets the Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), which is an alternative to LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). 

In this attack, the attacker uses a spoofed sender IP address of the victim to initiate requests to a vulnerable LDAP server. The vulnerable server then responds to the victim’s IP with amplified responses, thereby causing a reflection attack. This is a type of volumetric attack.

The AWS DDoS Attack: 2020

In 2020, Amazon Web Services Inc. revealed that it managed to dodge 2.3 terabytes-per-second distributed denial-of-service, the largest blow in the history of DDoS attacks. According to the report by AWS, this attack was based on a CLDAP DDoS reflection attack, orchestrated to disrupt the operations of the app or website by flooding the target with a massive volume of requests.

Memcached DDoS Attack

Like every other DDoS attack type, a Memcached DDoS Attack is an attack wherein the threat actor overwhelms the target’s server with internet traffic. 

In this attack, the attacker leverages a spoofed IP address to exploit a vulnerable UDP memcached server with small queries to elicit amplified responses directed at the victim’s IP address, giving the impression that the requests are coming from the victim itself. This is another example of a reflection-based volumetric attack.

The GitHub DDoS Attack: 2018

In 2018, a DDoS attack targeted GitHub, which is an online code management platform used by developers across the globe. The attack sent the servers of GitHub to frenzy with a whopping 1.2 Tbps of traffic, sent at a rate of 126.9 million per second. The source of the attack was traced to more than one thousand distinct autonomous systems (ASNs) spread across tens of thousands of individual endpoints.

HTTPS DDoS Attack

An HTTP flood attack, also known as Layer 7 DDoS attack (an Application Layer attack), leverages a seemingly legitimate HTTP GET or POST request to weigh down a server or an application. Instead of sending large packets, an attacker sends many requests over HTTP/HTTPS connection. This results in high CPU usage and memory consumption on the target host because it needs to process these requests before responding, potentially with an error message that says “server too busy” or “resource unavailable.” These types of DDoS attacks rely on a botnet, which is a network of compromised computers controlled by a single entity. Since the attacker employs standard URL requests, the forged traffic is almost indistinguishable from the valid traffic. 

The Google Attack: 2022

A notable example of an HTTPS DDoS Attack is one that Google suffered on On June 1, 2022. Google’s infrastructure and services were disrupted when the attacker used several addresses to generate over 46 million requests per second, which was 76% larger than the previously reported record.

SYN Flood Attack

An SYN flood attack (a type of Protocol Attack) is one of the most common types of assaults on your network. With this attack, an attacker sends a flood of SYN packets (part of the TCP handshake) to your server, often with spoofed source IP addresses. The server responds with an SYN-ACK packet to each SYN request, waiting for the final ACK packet which never arrives from the spoofed address. This leaves many half-open connections, consuming server resources until it can’t handle legitimate requests.

UDP Flood Attack

In a UDP flood attack (a Volumetric Attack), the attacker sends a large volume of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets to random ports on the target server. The server attempts to process these packets, checking for applications listening at those ports. Finding none, it replies with an ICMP “Destination Unreachable” packet. The sheer volume of incoming UDP packets and outgoing ICMP replies can exhaust the server’s resources and network bandwidth, causing service disruption.

Smurf Attack

A Smurf attack (a type of Volumetric/Reflection Attack) uses spoofed ICMP echo requests (pings). The attacker sends these pings to a network’s broadcast address, using the victim’s IP address as the source IP. All devices on the broadcast network then respond with ICMP echo replies to the victim’s spoofed address. This floods the target computer with thousands of pings per second, potentially overwhelming it.

Ping of Death Attack

The Ping of Death attack (a Protocol Attack) is one of the older DDoS attacks that exploits IP fragmentation. An attacker sends an IP packet larger than the maximum allowed size (65,535 bytes) by fragmenting it. When the target system tries to reassemble the oversized packet, it can cause buffer overflows and system crashes on older, unpatched systems. While less effective today due to better OS handling, the principle of exploiting protocol vulnerabilities remains relevant.

Protecting Against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks 

As the severity and frequency of different types of DDoS attacks become pressing issues for organizations and their security teams, it is crucial that they follow a strategic approach to dodge and mitigate the impact of these malicious attacks. Following a well-rounded cybersecurity plan not only helps enterprises fortify their network infrastructure but also maintains the integrity of their website/application. 

Here are a few ways to prevent DDoS attacks and ensure seamless online experiences for your users:

Reduce Attack Surface Exposure

One of the first steps to ensuring resilient digital infrastructure is to limit the points of vulnerabilities for attackers to target. Protect your important documents, applications, ports, protocols, servers, and other potential entry points. To do so, you can rely on a web application firewall (WAF) or CDN service to prevent threat actors from directly accessing your digital resources hosted on the server or the application. A CDN caches content globally and serves requests, while a WAF filters malicious requests. You must also use load balancers to distribute traffic and protect web servers. Regularly clean websites or applications by eliminating irrelevant services or open ports that hackers might exploit.

Monitor and Analyze Network Traffic

If you notice unusual activities or anomalies in your network traffic, take it as a sign to analyze and promptly respond to them. An efficient way to do this is by establishing a baseline or benchmark of what the typical network behavior looks like (Baseline Traffic Analysis). Anything that deviates significantly from this baseline could indicate a potential security breach. Watch out for red flags such as poor connectivity, slow performance, excess traffic to a specific endpoint, frequent crashes, or unusual traffic patterns from a single IP address or group. Low volume, short duration attacks can also be dangerous. Early detection through continuous traffic and packet profiling is indispensable. Look for communication with known command and control (C&C) servers used by botnets. Responding in real-time, perhaps using rule-based event correlation systems that automatically detect and react to suspicious activity, is crucial.

Ensure Robust Network Security

Implement multiple layers of network security to detect attacks early and limit their impact. Use firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS) to filter traffic. Employ antivirus and antimalware programs. Use tools to prevent IP address spoofing by verifying source addresses (e.g., ingress filtering). Ensure all network endpoints (desktops, laptops, mobile devices) are secured, as they are often exploited. Consider network segmentation to divide systems into subnets, limiting the blast radius if one segment is compromised. Limiting network broadcasting can also help; restrict or turn off broadcast forwarding and disable unnecessary services like echo and chargen where possible.

Have Server Redundancy

Using multiple distributed servers makes it challenging for attackers to hit all servers simultaneously. If one hosting device is attacked, others can remain operational and take over the traffic load until the targeted system recovers. Host servers in geographically diverse data centers or colocation facilities to avoid network bottlenecks. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) also inherently provides redundancy by distributing content across many servers.

Switch to Cloud-Based Solutions and Leverage Provider Capabilities

Cloud-based solutions not only ensure seamless scalability of resources but also are often more secure and reliable than traditional on-premises setups. Cloud providers typically have vastly more bandwidth than individual organizations, making it harder for volumetric attacks to succeed. The distributed nature of cloud infrastructure also inherently reduces susceptibility. Furthermore, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Cloud Providers play a crucial role. ISPs can block malicious traffic upstream, monitor for suspicious activity, provide on-demand bandwidth during attacks, and distribute attack traffic. Many cloud providers offer specialized DDoS protection services, leveraging their scale and expertise to detect and mitigate attacks effectively.

Have a Response Plan in Place

A well-laid-out response plan is crucial for any organization to handle incidents effectively, minimize damage, and ensure business continuity, in case of an attack. The more complex your infrastructure, the more detailed the plan needs to be. Your DDoS response plan should include the following:

• A systems checklist
• A well-trained response team
• Detection and alerting measures/protocols
• Comprehensive mitigation strategies (how to activate defenses, contact providers, etc.)
• Communication plans for internal and external stakeholders (including a list of who needs to be informed)
• Procedures for maintaining business operations during an attack
• A list of mission-critical systems

Conduct Vulnerability Assessments

Vulnerability assessments allow organizations to systematically review and examine the loopholes in their networks, systems, and applications before an attacker exploits them. This includes network and wireless assessments, policy reviews, and checking web applications and source code for flaws, often using automated scanning tools. Assessing risks, generating comprehensive reports, and continuously working on the assessment contributes to a robust cybersecurity strategy and helps ensure continued operations. This approach helps organizations alleviate the perils of DDoS attacks and their types.

Develop and Practice Good Cyber Hygiene Habits

Your team must be trained to practice good cyber hygiene habits to prevent systems from being compromised and potentially used in botnets. These include:

• Set strong, unique passwords (at least 12 characters with numbers, symbols, upper/lowercase letters) and change them regularly.
• Avoid sharing and reusing passwords.
• Use two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible to add an extra layer of security.
• Employ device encryption on laptops, tablets, smartphones, external drives, and cloud storage.
• Keep software and systems updated with the latest security patches.

The Costs of DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks are becoming longer, more sophisticated, and larger, significantly increasing the costs for businesses. According to research by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost per minute of downtime from a DDoS attack can be substantial, potentially reaching $22,000. The exact costs depend on factors like industry, business size, duration of the attack, and brand reputation. However, the true cost extends far beyond immediate financial losses and includes:

• Direct Costs: Bandwidth consumption, hardware damage or replacement, mitigation service fees.
• Legal costs: Potential lawsuits or regulatory fines if sensitive data is compromised or service level agreements are breached.
• Intellectual property losses: If the attack serves as a smokescreen for data theft.
• Production and operational losses: Lost sales, decreased productivity, customer churn due to service unavailability.
• Reputation damage: Loss of trust from customers, partners, and investors, which can have long-lasting effects.
• Losses due to recovery techniques: The cost of implementing and maintaining scrubbing centers, specialized hardware, and incident response efforts.

In a Nutshell 

Now that you know that the impact of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is far more costly and disruptive than ever, it’s essential to recognize the urgency of the situation and take proactive measures to protect your brand identity and maintain seamless business operations. The future of IP DDoS attacks remains uncertain, but they will continue to be a significant threat. As technology advances, attackers will gain access to more sophisticated tools, making defense increasingly challenging. Therefore, organizations must be proactive in their approach to cybersecurity. By embracing comprehensive vulnerability assessment tools, proactive incident response protocols, network monitoring tools, server redundancy, robust network security, cloud solutions, and fostering strong cybersecurity awareness among employees, your organization can counter the unprecedented surge in traffic manifested in the form of different types of DDoS attacks.

To defend your assets from illegal hacking and for all-around protection from email-based cyberattacks, rely on our experts at PowerDMARC. With our in-depth knowledge and extensive experience, we ensure your digital assets remain secure and your operations run smoothly, even in the face of adversaries. To learn more about our cybersecurity solutions, get in touch with us today!

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Ahona Rudra

Domain & Email Security Expert at PowerDMARC

Ahona is the Marketing Manager at PowerDMARC, with 5+ years of experience in writing about cybersecurity topics, specializing in domain and email security. Ahona holds a post-graduation degree in Journalism and Communications, solidifying her career in the security sector since 2019.

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