DDoS attacks have been around a while, but an emerging threat is the DDoS-as-a-Service model of attack. Instead of an individual or group attacking high-profile, large organizations, cybercriminals are now able to sell their expertise and botnets as a subscription.
This has created a problem for organizations. Suddenly, there are significantly higher odds of suffering a DDoS attack, and the attacks are becoming longer and larger in scale. To protect yourself and your organization, proactive DDoS protection services are essential.
What is DDoS-as-a-Service?
Although DDoS attacks are relatively simple attacks to execute, not every malicious actor has a botnet at his disposal. Filling this gap, to the chagrin of business owners and executives everywhere, is DDoS-as-a-Service. DDoS-as-a-Service is when cybercriminals rent access to botnets to perform DDoS attacks, which allows anyone to pay for an attack.
This combines a few formerly disparate threats. On the one hand, DDoS attacks are more frequent and severe than ever before due to rising numbers of poorly secured devices. These devices are often IoT devices that still have their default login credentials in place.
Malicious actors can leverage these devices against your organization by recruiting them to botnets, and then they can sell the services of these botnets to people who wish to attack your organization. The transaction is very simple. A potential attacker can choose the length and scale of the attack, transfer money to the botnet owner, and commence the DDoS attack.
How DDoS-as-a-Service Changes the Threat Landscape
This dynamic between the attacker and the targeted organization is new. In the past, an attacker has generally needed at least basic knowledge of code vulnerabilities and attack strategies. With DDoS-as-a-Service, an attacker can be anyone and can attack any organization.
These services are also extremely cheap, with subscription plans typically ranging from $15-$50 per month. Especially when compared to the cost of DDoS protection, this is nothing. Because the services are so cheap, attackers don’t have to be well-connected or picky about their targets.
This means that a wider range of organizations can be targets of attacks. In the past, an attacker would typically choose a large organization, such as a government institution or major corporation. Reasons for the attacks might be activism, terrorism, or sabotage.
With the low cost of DDoS attacks now, attackers can choose lower-profile organizations for less concrete reasons without the attack severely impacting them financially. An attacker could be an employee with a grudge or a competitor looking to disrupt your operations.
Another change brought by the advent of DDoS-as-a-Service is the growth of the cybercrime economy. With people suddenly paying for DDoS attacks, there is money to be made recruiting and leasing botnets. Before, DDoS attacks were not usually a profitable attack as the attacker did not reap any direct financial benefit from them.
Now, cybercriminals have a profit motive for making their attacks more sophisticated and difficult to detect. While DDoS attacks have always been very difficult to stop once they start, basic DDoS protection has gone a long way toward preventing them. Going forward, more advanced solutions will be required to effectively protect your organization.
Protecting Against the New DDoS Threat
Realistically, it’s only a matter of time before your organization experiences an attempted DDoS attack.
While you could opt for basic solutions like anti-DDoS hosting, which allows you to increase bandwidth or server space as needed, this option is generally expensive and not always effective. Some organizations have tried to use traditional firewalls, but firewalls also demand network and server resources. Rather than blocking the DDoS attack, a traditional firewall can add to the resource demands.
Traditional solutions tend to be reactive. It’s better to combat DDoS threats more proactively. Consider solutions that provide the following:
- Constant monitoring. There are often indicators of unusual activity before an attack begins. Automated monitoring and alerts can catch this activity, warning you ahead of time and reducing your risk of a DDoS attack.
- WAFs. Unlike traditional firewalls, web application firewalls (WAFs) can detect a DDoS attack before it overwhelms your resources. WAFs detect unusual activity patterns and block incoming requests, which makes it more difficult for DDoS bots to overwhelm your application. Ideally, the anti-DDoS solution you choose should filter and block malicious traffic before it is able to get anywhere near your network, which is one of the primary functions of a WAF. If the attack can’t successfully send a request, it can’t bottleneck your resources.
- Challenges. While CAPTCHAs are the most common type of challenge, they are not the only option. An effective solution should be able to run a few different tests on incoming traffic. CAPTCHAs could be one option, but another is cookie validation, in which the host sends a cookie to the client. A legitimate client returns the cookie whereas an illegitimate client cannot.
- Threat identification. Traditional solutions react to DDoS attacks and attempt to stop them, but modern solutions focus more on addressing suspicious activity patterns and unusual requests. By blocking the threats early, the solutions prevent a DDoS attack from beginning (much easier for your organization to handle than a DDoS attack already underway).
Although DDoS-as-a-Service has made DDoS attacks more accessible to the average, disgruntled person than ever before, there are security solutions available that can block these attacks. If you proactively implement DDoS protection solutions, you can greatly reduce your risk of a successful attack.
Good solutions aren’t cheap (especially when compared to the cost of DDoS attacks), but they are worth it for almost all organizations. The costs of downtime and damage to your reputation and customer relationships could be detrimental to your company. However, by implementing the right solution, you can ensure consistent uptime and prevent revenue losses, even if a botnet comes after you.
