DDoS Attacks: Three Main Types and the Strategies to Prevent Them

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INTL 647 - White Paper
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INTL 647 - White Paper
Introduction
Increasingly, both private and public organizations are being attacked by malicious actors, and the cost of securing computers and networks is higher more than ever before. One of the main forms of attacks is the DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is a malicious disruption of a website or network by overloading the server, service, or network. As such, a DDoS attack is a set of denial of service attacks coordinated through various computers or servers to overload a system, and the site becomes unavailable to users; DDoS attacks affect a site's security and stability, making it difficult to achieve the expected results. Typically, when there are too many requests, this affects the server's proper functioning, and the site may be extremely slow. Therefore, improving information security is necessary to protect against attacks such as DDoS attacks.
Background
The three main types of DDoS attacks are classified based on the negative impact on an organization's network or servers. They are the application layer attacks, protocol attacks, and volume-based attacks. Application layer attacks are the most sophisticated of all DDoS attacks, where the main focus is the web applications are the main focus. Protocol DDoS attacks occur when an attack targets and exploits vulnerabilities in server resources. Finally, volume-based attacks occur when excessive traffic is sent to a network to massively exceed its capacity, saturating the bandwidth of a network. Congestion, disruption, and interruption of sites and servers are a concern regardless of the type of DDoS attacks.
While DDoS attacks are not common when these attacks occur, they tend to affect business operations and increased the risk of financial losses. For example, when clients cannot access services, the employees cannot access resources and services and try to prevent the incident. Furthermore, there is a risk of possible loss of reputation by clients to the company in addition to the economic losses. Thus, it is necessary to plan for any situation like this and take the necessary measures to prevent being a victim of these attacks.
Ideally, there should be close monitoring and supervision of staff access to the digital assets is required. Visualizing and monitoring user access and activities is one of the priorities to improve security. However, even when there is authentication and authorization, there is a risk of DDoS attacks, and multi-layered solutions are necessary for added protection. Accessing the data and applications on different servers, including those hosted on the cloud, should be limited to those who are authorized to limit and prevent DDoS attacks (Saxena and Dey 2019, 232). There is a lower risk of DDoS attacks when there are multiple layers of security. However, challenges associated with the failure to detect respond to internal and external and internal threats are associated with increased vulnerabilities.
Solution
There are different strategies to prevent and protects against DDoS attacks, and the first is the proper configuration of the firewalls and routers. The correct configurations and appli...