Prevention Measures Against Denial of Service Attacks | Antivirus

One of the most important assets for many companies is their website, this can be a simple informational page or something essential for the business such as an online store. Unfair competition, cybercriminals, angry employees, or former employees, etc., all of them can put your company's website out of the game. One of the most common attacks they can carry out is a denial of service or DoS.

What is a Denial of Service Attack?

This type of attack aims to degrade the quality of a service, for example, a web page, and leave it in a non-functional state. To achieve this, the resources of the system hosting the service to be interrupted are saturated, sending them an avalanche of requests that they are not able to attend.

An evolution of this type of attack is the distributed denial of service or DDoS for its acronym in English Distributed Denial of Service. It consists of using a large number of attacking devices against the target. DDoS attacks are often carried out by bots, infected systems whose owner is often unaware that their devices are part of this malicious network.

To avoid being part of one of these networks, and if you are part of it, be aware of it, we put the Antibotnet Service at your disposal.

Prevention Measures Against DoS and DDoS

Denial of service attacks, whether distributed or not, have serious consequences on the attacked systems. Implementing preventive measures will be essential since, otherwise, we will only know that we have been victims of this attack when the service stops working.

To minimize the consequences of these attacks on our systems, different security measures must be incorporated.

Protection Measures in the Internal Network

When the website is on the company's internal network, perimeter protection elements must be incorporated to protect it. Among other measures:

Locate the web server in a demilitarized zone (between firewalls), also called DMZ, thus preventing an intruder from accessing the internal network if it violates the web server;

implement an intrusion detection and prevention system (IDS / IPS) that monitors connections and alerts us if it detects unauthorized access attempts or misuse of protocols;

use a device or software with mixed functionality (antivirus, firewall, and others), such as a UTM that allows the majority of cyber threats that can affect a company to be managed in a unified way.

The combined use of these elements, which can be both software and hardware, and their correct configuration, will reduce the chances of suffering a denial of service attack.

Protection Measures in Hosting

In the event that hosting has been contracted, you should inform yourself about the security measures that the provider has implemented. You will have to check that they are like the ones in the previous section. Some providers offer these security measures in the administration panel of web hosting. Check with the provider who will be in charge of its configuration and administration.

Bandwidth

This may be the most basic form of protection, but it is by no means the least effective. Regardless of whether the web service is within the organization or outsourced, it must have the highest possible bandwidth. In this way, you can better manage traffic spikes that cause denials of service.

Redundancy and Load Balancing

Redundancy consists of having the asset duplicated on more than one server and load balancing allows it to be assigned to one server or another depending on the workload it is supporting. This measure reduces the risks of suffering one of these attacks, since having more than one server will reduce the possibility of it being stopped due to overload. In addition, it provides other advantages such as fault tolerance, since if one server goes down, the total work would be assumed by the other server.

Cloud-based Security Solutions

One of the solutions that any web service considered critical must-have is an application firewall or WAF for its acronym in English Web Application Firewall. The web provider's cloud-based security can be helpful when preventing and mitigating the effects of a denial-of-service attack. WAFs, which offer cloud-based solutions, act as intermediaries between our web service and users, also getting in the way of cybercriminals or bots. At any sign of attack, the WAF will act and prevent malicious connections from reaching the website, thus avoiding denials of service.

Updated Systems

Some of the denial-of-service attacks originate from out-of-date systems, as these are essentially more vulnerable. Keeping the software (servers, web content managers, etc.) updated is essential to avoid any type of attack. DoS or DDoS attacks are no exception.

Also, the attack surface must be reduced as much as possible, so any service that is not strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website must be uninstalled. The smaller the attack surface, the lower the possibility of suffering one.

Finally, having a Security Master Plan and its corresponding Incident Management Plan that includes this type of attack can make a difference when the company is attacked. 

Denial of service attacks can affect any business, but the consequences will vary greatly depending on the prevention measures that have been taken. If these are correct, the consequences of the attack will be imperceptible, but if the prevention measures are null, the website may be inoperative for the entire duration of the attack. Protect your website against denial of service attacks!