Three Types of DDoS Attacks Most Difficult to Prevent

There are various forms of DDoS attacks, but it is not so easy to stop all of these, even for the cyber-security experts. This is why we have compiled a list of top three toughest-to-stop DDoS attacks from a web hosting service provider’s point of view. In a general sense, it is tough to block the attacks which mimic the legitimate traffic related to the target application, but some are very tricky to block. Read on to know the types of these distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are.

Direct Botnet DDoS Attacks

A botnet refers to a number of infected computers, servers, or the Internet of Things devices, which the attacker can control through a command and control (C&C) server. Depending upon the botnet type, the malicious party can utilize it for various attacks. For instance, in ‘Layer 7’ DDoS attacks, they make every single infected system send POST or GET request to the target site until the server resources are used up.

Botnets generally establish entire TCP connections in the course of the attack, which makes stopping it tricky. Such an attack can be changed to cause as much damage as humanly possible to applications, websites, and game servers.

You can mitigate this attack by evaluating the connections coming from the computer programs and discovering in what way the payloads these send differs from legitimate connections.

TCP SYN-ACK Reflection Attack

A hacker delivers a spoofed data packet to a transmission control protocol service to cause it to seem that it came from the target’s IP address. This causes the service to deliver a Synchronization/Acknowledgment packet to that target device’s IP.

This attack is tough to prevent since it needs a stateful inspection firewall supporting connection tracking. Generally, some firewall device resources are required for connection tracking, depending on the number of legitimate connections the device should monitor. It would verify whether an SYN packet is delivered to the address which it gets the said packet from.

Layer 7 Attacks

This is another DDoS attack, which floods the target server with too many HTTP requests to exhaust that system’s resources. This is how it mimics website visitors. There are patterns in some Layer 7 DDoS attacks that are easily identifiable. These attacks keep evolving to go around common methods of detection, so they can be such a big threat to web security.

Some of the mitigation strategies for these are limiting of HTTP requests, limiting of HTTP connections, stopping malicious browser’s user agent (UA) strings and utilizing a web firewall.

Many different elements and various parties play a role in both DDoS attack mitigation and protection from DDoS, including your web hosting service provider. HostSailor, for one, gives the services for all forms of these attacks, including the above-mentioned ones.