After another record year for DDoS attacks, how should the service provider community respond to increased customer expectation for 'clean' services?

A quick scroll-down through the infographic from A10 Networks on multi-vector DDoS attacks yields some pretty frightening insights into what last year looked like from a DDoS perspective. Alongside significant year-on-year increase in the number of DDoS attacks against customers, 2015 also saw the scale of DDoS attack also growing steadily with 12 attacks exceeding 1,000Gbps and 25% of all reported attacks coming close to, if not exceeding 100Gbps. Although it is still the customer rather than the service provider who finds themselves the target, the associated increase in attacks on cloud-based services, a 19% increase in the last 2 years, shows the significance of the service provider in being part of the solution.

Effectively mitigating the threat of DDoS attacks is a touch challenge for any organisation. Alongside more familiar high-volume attacks, application-layer (DNS proved particularly popular in 2015) and multi-vector attacks where DDoS is used as a distraction for either malware infiltration or data exfiltration, both grew significantly. The response therefore needs to be layered and go beyond iACLs and traditional IDMS. Whilst no one device can ever claim the role of Panacea against DDoS, it is good to see the convergence of layered mitigation technologies into single, scalable next-generation devices. These offer a unified solution across the Network, Session and Application layers, and delivering features like the following;

Network Layer - A range of embedded defences against low-level (SYN-ACK) type attacks, protocol validation to stem malformed packet propagation, rate-limiting based on configurable thresholds and 'default-deny' policy enforcement

Session Layer - Intelligent memory handling to mitigate flood-attacks during connection negotiation, extensive DNS protections to block UDP floods, query-based floods and other tricks and full proxy architectures to support inbound session termination and other mitigation techniques

Application Layer - Application protocol validation to eliminate any attacks based on malformed requests and illegal behaviours, Surge protection and priority queuing to protect legitimate traffic under attack conditions, HTTP flood protection to mitigate HTTP GET floods by exposing DDoS bots and HTTP low-bandwidth attack protection that defeats slowloris and slow POST attacks.

Customers increasingly expect communication services that are free from contaminants and highly available rather than just simple connections at the mercy of network conditions. Frost and Sullivan made a good observation in their 'The Expanding Role of Service Providers in DDoS Mitigation' paper from last March - Comparing clean pipes to public transportation they reason that access to an underground subway system is adequate but not very useful if unsafe. To attract and maintain regular custom the managers for the underground service are therefore required to install surveillance systems or deploy security patrols to improve safety. The expectations customers have of their service provider is increasingly much the same. Furthermore, with many of us looking towards cloud-based services as a logical, sometimes essential, augmentation to our existing base communication services portfolios, the provision of mitigation services for DDoS attacks is set to become an important, if not vital differentiator.

Get in touch to speak to one of our experts to learn more about Security and DDoS in more detail and how we're helping other Service providers to protect their network and protect their customers from the rising number of these attacks!

Alternative Networks plc published this content on 26 September 2016 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein.
Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 26 September 2016 10:25:01 UTC.

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