7 Misconceptions About DDoS Attacks That Could Jeopardize Your Business

Rolf Gierhard, VP of marketing at Link11 busts the most dangerous and pervasive myths about DDoS attacks – and shows how organizations can protect against them

Most organizations understand that DDoS attacks are disruptive and potentially damaging.  But many are also unaware of just how quickly the DDoS landscape has changed over the past two years, and underestimate how significant the risk from the current generation of attacks has become to the operation of their business. Here, I’m going to set the record straight about seven of the biggest misconceptions that I hear about DDoS attacks.

• There are more important security issues than DDoS that need to be resolved first.

When it comes to cyber-attacks, the media focuses on major hacks, data breaches and ransomware incidents. DDoS attacks are growing rapidly in scale and severity: the number of attacks grew by 71% in Q3 2018 alone, to an average of over 175 attacks per day, while the average attack volume more than doubled according to the Link11 DDoS Report. The number of devastating examples is large. In late 2017, seven of the UK’s biggest banks were forced to reduce operations or shut down entire systems following a DDoS attack, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds according the UK National Crime Agency.  And in 2018, online services from several Dutch banks and numerous other financial and government services in the Netherlands were brought to a standstill in January and May. These attacks were launched using Webstresser.org, the world’s largest provider of DDoS-on-demand, which sold attack services for as little as £11.  It costs a criminal almost nothing and requires little to no technical expertise to mount an attack, but it costs a company a great deal to fix the damage they cause.

What’s more, DDoS attacks are often used as a distraction, to divert IT teams’ attention away from attempts to breach corporate networks.  As such, dealing with DDoS attacks should be regarded as a priority, not a secondary consideration.

• I know that DDoS attacks are common, but I’ve never been affected before

Many companies underestimate the risk of being hit by DDoS because they have never been hit before. The truth is that oftentimes only one attack is already more than enough to cause severe damage in the value chain. This potentially affects any company that is connected to the Internet in any way. Overload attacks not only affect websites, but also all other web services such as e-mail communication, intranet, customer connections, supplier and workflow systems, and more.  Today, customers and partners expect 100% availability. Besides the business interruption due to production loss and recovery costs, reputational damage is a common consequence. Total costs for the incidents can quickly go into the millions. On the other hand, the costs for proactive protection against these kinds of attacks are comparably negligible.

• There are many providers offering a solution, so DDoS is an easy problem to fix

DDoS is not a new topic, which means that many of the available solutions are outdated. Only a few provider deliver up-to-date, real-time protection that secures against all types of attacks on all network layers. Only a handful of providers can react immediately in an emergency, i.e. if the attack has already taken place, and quickly provide the right protection to organizations.

• Reacting to an attack within a few minutes is sufficient

Ideally, the use of intelligent defence systems and always-on protection should prevent a failure in the first place. However, if a new attack pattern appears, the first 30 seconds are crucial. Even if an attack is mitigated after just one minute, subsequent IP connections will already be interrupted (for example, collapsing an IPSec tunnel) and it may take several hours until availability is restored. Although this prevents follow-up actions that can lead to infiltration and data theft, the economic costs of lost revenue, loss of productivity and damage to reputation can still be immense. Therefore, it is vital for organizations to implement a solution that guarantees mitigation in a matter of seconds.

• We have our own 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC), so we are immune

In the flood of security alerts in the SOC it is likely that some events are overlooked or not brought into context with other activities. Furthermore, the sheer amount of necessary analyses and measures is not feasible with people. Only a fully automated process that works based on intelligent and globally networked systems, and which precludes human errors in the process chain can ensure comprehensive security. Industrial-scale attacks can only be countered with industrial-scale defences.

• I am already in the cloud and am automatically protected by my cloud provider

The major cloud providers offer some basic DDoS protections. But this is not aimed at preventing targeted, mega-scale attacks. In late 2016, the massive Dyn DDoS attack caused global disruption to public cloud services.  In addition, cloud applications are easily attacked by other applications from within the same cloud. Therefore, when running business-critical applications in the cloud, it is important to consider deploying additional DDoS protections to those applications.

• I have invested in hardware that offers protection

Although these systems ensure high infrastructure performance, they only provide static protection against DDoS attacks. This means that the DDoS protection there can only be as good as the current version of the filtering software – which is already outdated as soon as it is released. This approach might have worked a couple of years ago. Nowadays, however, with ever more complex and powerful attacks that combine several vectors and target multiple layers at the same time, this kind of protection is unsufficient. Effective protection is only possible via intelligent and networked systems which use advanced machine-learning techniques to analyse traffic and build a profile of legitimate traffic.

In conclusion, DDoS protection needs to be seen as an essential part of the IT security infrastructure. Considering effective solutions in the event of an attack is too late. Through educating about misconceptions in this context and implementing the measures listed in this text, companies can position themselves sustainably in terms of their business continuity strategy.