As DDoS Evolves, How Are Protection Services Adapting?

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) remains a serious cyber threat in 2024. The number of DDoS attacks per company worldwide has risen by 94% year over year, with finance, tech, healthcare, and government organizations as top targets. On the surface level, DDoS can be characterized as a straightforward threat that focuses on overwhelming servers to make them unavailable. However, stopping it continues to be extremely challenging.

The difficulty in combating DDoS is mostly due to its evolution, as its methodologies and tactics have advanced. For one, the volume and scale of attacks have grown exponentially, presenting new challenges to defense systems. Their sophistication has also leveled up, moving from simple flooding techniques to application-layer attacks aimed at specific apps or services. Conventional DDoS protection solutions have a hard time detecting and mitigating these sophisticated attacks.

Cybersecurity solutions are also evolving to counter the worsening of DDoS threats. Here are a few key ways anti-DDoS solutions are advancing to keep up with the sophistication and aggressiveness of new DDoS attacks.

Leveraging AI to Fight AI-Boosted Attacks

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a potent tool for the threat actors behind DDoS attacks. It helps them to understand defense mechanisms, which facilitates the dynamic adjustment of attacks. Also, AI plays a role in automated botnet management, resulting in smarter botnets that optimize the exploitation of compromised devices to strengthen attacks. 

Additionally, AI is used for reconnaissance activities to find vulnerable targets and maximize available resources for a DDoS campaign.

DDoS protection services now harness AI to enhance detection and mitigation. AI-powered systems can monitor network traffic in real time to detect anomalies that may indicate an attack. They can also conduct predictive analytics to anticipate the possibilities of attacks based on data accumulated from previous attacks. 

Additionally, artificial intelligence automates many tasks involved in DDoS defense and mitigation. It enables dynamic blocking and filtering, as well as the optimization of resources to slow down the impact of an attack and buy enough time to reduce damages.

Notably, AI is useful in automatically generating optimal security for ranges of IP addresses. The technology makes it possible to put up DDoS defenses that are comparable to having tireless SOC engineers who continuously customize security policies based on the latest threat intelligence and enriched time-series traffic data.

Cloud-Based Protection for Scalability 

As DDoS attacks hit record-high volumes, the limited ability of organizations to defend themselves against campaigns becomes more pronounced. They need scalable solutions to absorb and capably mitigate the influx of malicious traffic. This is where cloud-based DDoS provides an appropriate solution. 

In contrast to conventional on-premise solutions, cloud-based DDoS protection is managed by a cloud service provider. It is designed to take advantage of the scalability and distributed nature of cloud infrastructure, providing greater capabilities in detecting, absorbing, and mitigating growing denial-of-service attacks. 

Cloud-based DDoS solutions typically include traffic scrubbing centers with a global distribution, providing not only extensive coverage but also elastic scalability. They perform real-time traffic analysis and continuous monitoring to ensure maximum protection. 

They also consolidate threat intelligence and are designed for collaborative defense. Moreover, they are designed to integrate with existing infrastructure and provide API integration, which allows organizations to customize their DDoS defense strategies.

Cloud-based solutions address growing attack volumes and the increased sophistication of application-layer and protocol attacks. They can also provide the ability to seamlessly work with web application firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and other cybersecurity tools that help address DDoS threats.

Multi-Layered and Hybrid Defense Across Vectors

DDoS attack perpetrators have learned to employ multiple vectors to increase the success of their attacks. They launch multiple simultaneous attacks against several attack points to weaken the ability of defenses to detect and stop server request overloads. They can use UDP flooding, ICMP flooding, SYN flooding, ACK flooding, RST/FIN flooding, HTTP flooding, Slowloris, DNS query flooding, Socstress, resource hijacking, and amplification attacks at the same time. They’ve also been known to add DNS and NTP reflection as well as stateful protocol exploitation to the fray.

Organizations with limited DDoS capabilities will have a hard time detecting all attacks, let alone defending against them. Many tend to mistakenly believe that they have already parried an attack only to eventually learn that their defenses failed to secure other attack points. 

To ensure adequate protection against multi-vector threats, it is important to implement a multi-layered defense that provides appropriate protection against volumetric, protocol, and application layer attacks. This includes network layer and application layer defense, DNS protection, traffic filtering, load balancing, endpoint security, and cloud-based protection. 

It also helps to adopt hybrid protection models to bring together the benefits of on-premise and cloud-based defenses. Hybrid solutions provide optimum security as well as the flexibility to address various attacks. They provide high-availability protection, low-latency protection, and simplified management.

Maximizing Defense through Zero Trust 

Many cyber attacks use DDoS as a smokescreen, misdirecting security teams to increase the chances of succeeding in a sneak attack. These other attacks may exploit security controls with weak access or permission-granting systems. 

They can also take advantage of insider assistance, with employees unwittingly (or even knowingly) facilitating the deactivation or weakening of cyber defenses to reduce the likelihood of attack detection. As such, it is crucial to adopt the principle of zero trust. All access requests should be thoroughly verified, and nobody should be given quick access just because of their role in the organization. 

There should be no presumption of trustworthiness. All users should go through strict identity verification to avoid security failures brought about or assisted by compromised credentials and malicious insiders.

In line with the principle of zero trust, organizations should also implement the policy of least privilege. The granting of resource access should be limited to the minimum required to perform a specific task – no more, no less. Doing this limits potential attack surfaces. It also helps in pinpointing insider suspects if breaches happen.

Key Takeaways

Threat actors will continue to enhance DDoS attacks in response to the latest detection and prevention capabilities. As new technologies like AI mature, hackers will find new ways to harness their power for DDoS potency. 

Potential DDoS attack targets need to embrace the latest defense solutions to keep up with the evolution of threats. For now, the best solutions are AI-bolstered, cloud-based, and multi-layered, but the arms race is hardly over. Likewise, by embracing the principle of zero trust, it’s possible to avoid succumbing to attacks that use DDoS as an obfuscation or diversion tactic.