DDoS Full Form

What is the full form of DDoS?

DDoS, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service, is one of the relentless and most destructive cyberattacks that exist. DDoS attacks do not aim to penetrate your security barrier, in contrast to other types of cyberattacks. Instead, a DDoS attack seeks to compromise a server and prevent all legitimate users from accessing a website and its server. This is accomplished by pushing out a massive amount of internet traffic, which renders a network or service unreachable to any authorized user. The Distributed Denial of Service attack is a distinctive type of cyberattack because it uses multiple interconnected devices that are distributed throughout the Internet to perform attacks.

What is DDoS?

DDoS Attack, also known as a "Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack," is a type of cybercrime where the attacker overwhelms a server with heavy internet traffic in an attempt to prevent users from accessing linked websites and online services. A botnet, or group of interconnected online devices, is used in a DDoS attack to flood a target website with false traffic. As DDoS attacks don't seek to breach the security perimeter but instead prevent legitimate users from accessing a website or servers, they can be quite difficult to detect. For this reason, DDoS attacks often serve as a smokescreen or distraction for other malicious cybercrime activities such as disabling security devices and breaching the security perimeter of the target server.

A successful distributed denial of service attack has a significant impact on the entire online user base. As a result, it is a popular tool for hacktivists, cyberterrorists, extortionists, and anybody else trying to further an agenda or make a point.

The types of people and organizations eager to carry out this kind of cyberattack, as well as the reasons for committing a DDoS, differ greatly. Some assaults are carried out by disgruntled people and hacktivists who wish to take down a company's servers in order to make a point, have fun by taking advantage of a cyber vulnerability, or demonstrate their discontent. Other DDoS attacks might involve financial motivation and business competition, such as an organization that wants to disrupt a rival company's online operations in order to steal business. Extortion through DDoS attacks is also becoming an increasingly common occurrence. Cyberattackers target a firm, install some type of ransomware on its servers, and then demand that the firm pay a substantial quantity of money in order to undo the harm.

Today, even the largest and most powerful companies in the world are not immune to getting cyber-attacked through DDoS, often termed as being “DDoS’ed”.

DDoS Vs DoS

Both DoS and DDoS attacks are used to overwhelm a system by sending a targeted system an excessive amount of false traffic causing denial-of-service to further users. However, there are significant differences between a Denial-of-Services (DoS) attack and a Distributed-Denial-of-Services (DDoS) attack.

In a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, a malicious attacker tries to make a computer or other electronic device unavailable to its intended users by interrupting the device's regular operation. The defining feature of DoS is that a single computer is used to initiate the attack.

DDoS is a subset of a DoS attack. When multiple systems coordinate a synchronized DoS attack on a single target, the attack is known as a DDoS attack. The primary distinction of DDoS when compared to DoS is that in DDoS the target is attacked from numerous locations simultaneously, as opposed to only one.

The distribution of multiple systems or hosts that defines a DDoS provides the attacker multiple advantages such as being able to leverage the greater volume of traffic being generated from multiple systems to execute a very damaging attack. There is also a lesser risk of the perpetrator getting caught as the location of the attack and the originating attacking party is tough to identify. This is because they are masked behind many randomly located compromised systems throughout the world. Lastly, it is simply more challenging to shut down multiple machines than just one.

Due to these characteristics, DDoS provides many advantages to the perpetrators. Thus, the majority of DoS assaults can be defended against by modern security technology, but DDoS attacks are seen as a higher threat and are of greater concern to enterprises.

How Does a DDoS Attack Take Place?

To launch a DDoS assault, an attacker must first take control of networked systems. Hackers can achieve this by infecting them with malicious code. Each hacked system is referred to as a "bot" after it has been compromised, and the grouping of all bots is referred to as a "botnet." The attacker is in complete control of the botnet at this point, and all hacked systems are receiving the most recent commands. These bots can now flood the target IP address with false data packets, which causes the system to reach its capacity and shut down. As a result, authorized users are unable to use the service. It is often extremely difficult to distinguish between genuine traffic and false traffic because each bot is actually a valid internet device that the compromised service cannot identify as malware.

Types of DDoS Attacks

Volume-Based Attacks: This type of attack tries to overload the available bandwidth between the Internet and the target service (or server). To do this, the attacker sends a huge number of data packets utilizing a botnet. This causes congestion and hence the services become inaccessible to the affected users. Examples include ping floods, DNS amplification, UDP floods, and ICMP floods.

Application-Based Attacks: This is one of the most difficult attacks to identify. The attacker exploits the weaknesses in a system protocol stack’s 7th layer called the application layer. Once the attacker reaches this layer, the DDoS affects the CPU or memory with the aim of taking down a website or application, instead of the network. Cache bypass, HTTP flooding, and server attacks on DNS are a few examples of Application based DDoS attacks.

Protocol-Based Attacks - In this type of attack, the attacker targets and exploits weaknesses in layers 3 and 4 of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) stack. The processing power of the intermediate and target services, as well as any other network gear like firewalls, are all consumed by this cyberattack, which disrupts the network. Ping of Death and SYN flood are two instances.

Effect of DDos Attack

A DDoS attack can have severe negative effects, especially if it is executed on an organization’s servers or systems. After a DDoS attack, the entire organization’s productivity comes to a standstill because all critical network systems need to be shut down. If a DDoS attack makes an organization's website unresponsive or slow to load, visitors might feel that the website is unreliable and shift to other organizations that offer comparable services. If the website offers direct services that directly impact the firm’s revenue such as e-commerce websites, unavailability of those services like not being able to perform transactions can cause significant financial losses for the firm.

Preventing and Mitigating DDoS Attacks

While we can never guarantee complete protection from a DDoS attack, we can take the following preventive measures to stay vigilant.

• Organizations must monitor their website traffic closely and look for abnormalities such as unexplained traffic spikes and visits from suspicious IPs. These can be “test runs” by attacks before launching a full-fledged attack. This can alert the company of the possibility of a DDoS attack.

• Organizations can simulate an attack on the IT infrastructure using third-party DDoS testing to check the system’s vulnerabilities and prepare a response plan.

• Companies must create an action plan and a rapid response team to minimize a possible attack’s impact on the business. The firm can designate people with specific jobs and create standard protocols for each department to follow in the unfortunate event of a DDoS attack.

Despite the best preventive practices, cybercriminals may target and attack an organization. Hence, it is wise to have a mitigation plan ready for when a DDoS attack is underway, in order to reduce the attack’s impact and restore systems quickly. The following methods are some examples of DDoS attack mitigation:

• Regular risk assessment of servers, systems, and networks can help the company be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of its IT infrastructure. This is key to formulating a strategy to minimize damage and disruption

• Traffic differentiation by determining the source of abnormal traffic which can be then shut down. The attacker’s traffic can also be distributed by the company across a network of servers that can absorb it to make it more manageable.

• Rate limiting, which refers to limiting the number of requests a server can accept in a particular time period, can also be used as a part of a company’s DDoS attack mitigation strategy.

• To mitigate the impact of an application-based attack, organizations can choose to use a Web Application Firewall that filters out requests. These filters can be modified based on the pattern of DDoS attacks.

• As a last resort, companies can choose to employ black hole routing, in which the network administrator essentially pushes all traffic - false or authentic- to a null route and drops it from the network. It is important to note that even legitimate traffic is stopped in this approach.