How to Prevent DDoS Attacks? Staying One Step Ahead

20 January 2025

As the business landscape changes, cybercriminals too are not left behind when it comes to causing disruption, ruining everything that took years to build. Because cyberattacks are rising, having effective protection for both businesses and customers has become crucial. However, one such common topic of concern for modern organisations is distributed denial of service aka DDoS attacks.

Especially as many companies rely on websites and cloud-based servers, hackers now focus on these areas, flooding the networks with bot traffic and affecting user experience. This guide will help you understand what DDoS attacks are, including measures your organisation can take to prevent them.

What are DDoS Attacks

A Distributed Denial of Service aka DDoS attack is one of the common methods in cyberattack. Allowing to achieve huge financial gains without having to put in lots of effort, cybercriminals use it, especially for being low cost and simple to execute.

However, DDoS attacks work by flooding your website or servers with a large amount of traffic, unlike other forms of cyberattacks. To put it simply, it works like a massive number of users trying to enter your website. Moreover, this will make everything slow down, increasing the loading time.

Every visitor to your site needs access to its content, but when the demand increases beyond what your server can handle, two things can happen. Either visitors experience frustratingly long delays, or the server crashes entirely.

To deal with this, you may require experienced and efficiently managed cyber security services, helping ensure your business is overall safe from such increasing attacks.

How can I Stop A DDos Attack – Exploring Effective Strategies

However, in the worst case, these attackers will make your website quite difficult to open, leaving your organisation offline and your users frustrated for your poor service. In addition, showing a slow system or broken website can bring some severe consequences to your business. Some of these could be:

To prevent DDoS attacks, you may take several steps. For instance

• First, you will need to limit your attack surface exposure. You can use methods like restricting traffic to specific locations, adding a load balancer, blocking outdated ports, etc.
• Create a comprehensive asset list to implement advanced threat detection, assessment, and filtering tools, like firewalls or endpoint protection. For educational institutions, creating such lists with the help of its support in education ensures better management and protection.
• Regularly, keep monitoring logs to spot threats by analysing traffic patterns, identifying unusual activities, and blocking malicious requests.
• To oversee all these things, you may need to make an effective response team. Moreover, share their key responsibilities and provide the necessary tools to manage everything.
• A cache saves copies of content, reducing load on servers. Therefore, using a CDN helps handle requests efficiently, preventing overload from both genuine users and potential attacks.
• Another way to deal with these risks is by considering high-quality managed cyber security services. Or, opting for industry-based outsourced providers, like it support in education, especially if your organisation operates within the educational domain.

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks – Understanding Their Types

There are several DDoS attack types, each causing serious harm to your business:

Resource (Application) Layer: Application layer DDoS attacks disrupt data transmission by targeting web packets and sending servers with direct web traffic to cause problems for users.

Protocol: Unlike application-based attacks, protocol DDoS attacks ruin connections by affecting verification processes, including SYN floods, reflection attacks, and similar protocol-based disruptions.

Volumetric: This is what most cybercriminals use. A volumetric attack can jam the network layer with an unexpected amount of website traffic. However, as the bot floods the networks with lots of data, your servers may need to work more to check everything, taking a longer time to respond.

How to Stop DDos, if I Face One?

As mentioned earlier, most of the DDoS attackers focus on ruining servers, services or networks, sending unwanted internet traffic to ruin user experience. To find out whether your organisation has become a victim or not, however, you can check your business network.

If you notice your network is facing slow performance or is too long or quite severe, you may need to take action. Moreover, you can invest in prevention tools, including web application firewalls and always-on DDoS mitigation. Or you can even seek well-managed cyber security services, providing the required help and guidance.

Furthermore, you may consider outsourced providers, such as it support in education, particularly if your organisation is related to the education sector, helping tackle these attacks effectively.

Conclusion

Preventing DDoS attacks needs long-term planning and proactive measures, including robust security tools, continuous monitoring, and scalable infrastructure. But still, this might not be enough, especially if you are not focusing on your weak spots, such as endpoints. Above all, you’ll have to stay informed about the industry changes and keep adapting your strategies accordingly with time.