If you do fall victim to a DDoS attack, you are not alone. High-profile victims of DDoS attacks in 2018 include organizations as diverse as Google, Amazon, PlayStation, Pinterest, and GitHub – which was on the receiving end of the highest volume DDoS attack ever witnessed.
In this article, you will learn how to stop DDoS attack on your website quickly and effectively.
1. Identify the DDoS attack early
The trick to stop DDoS attack is detect the DDoS attack as early as possible. The earlier the detection, the faster you can implement security measures to reduce and ultimately, overcome the DDoS attacks.
To be in a position to do this, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with your typical inbound traffic profile; the more you know about what your normal traffic looks like, the easier it is to spot when its profile changes. Most DDoS attacks start as sharp spikes in traffic, and it’s helpful to be able to tell the difference between a sudden surge of legitimate visitors and the start of a DDoS attack.
2. Enable Cloudflare security features
Cloudflare is an excellent website security feature when it comes to avoiding DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare’s layered security approach combines multiple DDoS mitigation capabilities into one service. It prevents disruptions caused by bad traffic, while allowing good traffic through, keeping websites, applications and APIs highly available and performant.
3. DDoS mitigation services at urgent times
For very large attacks, it’s likely that your best chance of staying online is to use a specialist DDoS mitigation company. These organizations have large-scale infrastructure and use a variety of technologies, including data scrubbing, to help keep your website online. You may need to contact a DDoS mitigation company directly, or your hosting company or service provider may have a partnership agreement with one to handle large attacks.
“If a customer needs DDoS mitigation, then we divert their traffic to (DDoS mitigation company) Black Lotus,” said Dufficy. “We do this using BGP, so it only takes a few minutes.”
Black Lotus’s scrubbing center can handle very high levels of traffic, and sends on the cleaned traffic to its intended destination. This results in higher latency for website users, but the alternative is that they wouldn’t be able to access the site at all.
DDoS mitigation services are not free, so it’s up to you whether you want to pay to stay online or take the hit and wait for the DDoS attack to subside before continuing to do business. Subscribing to a DDoS mitigation service on an ongoing basis may cost a few hundred dollars a month. If you wait until you need one, however, expect to pay much more for the service and wait longer before it starts to work.
4. Overprovision bandwidth
It generally makes sense to have more bandwidth available to your Web server than you ever think you are likely to need. That way, you can accommodate sudden and unexpected surges in traffic that could be a result of an advertising campaign, a special offer or even a mention of your company in the media.
Even if you overprovision by 100 percent — or 500 percent — that likely won’t stop a DDoS attack. But it may give you a few extra minutes to act before your resources are overwhelmed completely.
